


Till Death, Parted

by Hecatetheviolet



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, American Roadtrip, Canon Asexual Character, Chronic Pain, Crack Treated Seriously, Disabled Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Fake/Pretend Relationship, First Dates, Grief/Mourning, He/Him Pronouns For Nonbinary Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Las Vegas Wedding, Marriage Proposal, Other, Past Georgie Barker/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Speedrun Friends to Lovers to Spouses, The Character Death is Gerry, They/Them Pronouns for Nonbinary Gerard Keay, Wakes & Funerals, ghost story, nb4nb vibing in the american west coast
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-03
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:21:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 33,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27749680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hecatetheviolet/pseuds/Hecatetheviolet
Summary: “But, yes, if you all really must know, I married Gerard Keay in Las Vegas.” The total stillness at the table would have better suited a painting than a group of very confused archival assistants. A blob of ketchup falls from the chip frozen halfway to Melanie’s mouth.“You… married a ghost,” says Melanie, eventually, in a stilted, leading tone.“Mhm,” says Jon.A ghost story is something that can be so matrimonial, actually. Too bad Jon and Gerry didn't find that out until the wedding.
Relationships: Gerard Keay & Gertrude Robinson, Gerard Keay & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Gerard Keay/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist's Grandmother, Trevor Herbert & Julia Montauk
Comments: 62
Kudos: 205
Collections: TMA Big Bang 2020





	1. Funeral

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a funeral is held in silence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is based on my posts about a Jon/Gerry Vegas Wedding AU, which can be found here https://bigowlenergy.tumblr.com/post/627093601557643264/tma-au-where-jon-comes-back-from-america-with-a
> 
> Shout out to me betas who worked with me on this during the Big Bang event - this fic would not exist without you!  
> Artwork for this chapter can be found here: https://tmabigbang.tumblr.com/

Jon sets up the record player first.

Its carrying case is heavily embellished with stickers - local, hand drawn, small print; gifts and jokes and honest expressions of enjoyment. Bands and bars and shops from all over England and Italy and further. Placement random in a way that gives the impression of artful avant garde rather than carelessness. Some are faded, many overlapping, a few peeled or scored as though they had fallen out of favor over the years - or, perhaps, just the damage accrued from moving between safehouses and hotel rooms and offered couches for years and years and years. A life in transition, with only the comfort of familiar music transported alongside.

The player itself is only dusty, thankfully; it was clearly lovingly well-kept by careful hands. It starts up with crackling, empty static so intrinsic to Jon’s being that he has to watch the plate spin slowly for a long moment before he’s certain that the noise is coming from outside of himself, for once. The albums stacked in a milkcrate are totally unfamiliar, all strange band names and overdone arthouse album titles done up in the trappings of those who weaponize the mystery of the occult without any true knowledge of it. A foreign poetry. 

Jon’s been learning to appreciate poetry, lately.

The record at the top of the stack goes under the needle. Jon Knows that it was Gerry’s favorite. With the volume turned low, the loud, raucous music is oddly easy to tune out. A mesh of sound that fills the empty air with unintelligible lyrics and disjointed, droning instruments. Gently stirring up the dust, but not overwhelming. Drowns out the bustle of the trains outside.

It’s a bit familiar, aside from the alien sound. The physicality of it, the process, the care and keeping of something antique and fragile for nothing more than the honest joy of music. His grandmother had kept copies of her and her acquaintances’ opera performances on vinyl, and for most of Jon’s childhood, that had been the only music they had. It had been Jon’s solemn duty to keep the records clean and the player in good order. Finding this odd little connection between him and this person he Knows - and vicariously experienced meeting again and again through statements but barely knew  _ and  _ just celebrated the wedding of and mourned at the funeral for - is strangely right.

They had spoken about music, briefly, on their last date. Jon only knew opera and classical while Gerry had only known metal and local bands. It had been so much more about how they felt about the music than the music itself. Despite the massive difference in genre, Jon could appreciate how the music made Gerry feel. Besides - this is more their funeral than the burning was, in a way. There should be music.

Gerry’s compact travel player isn’t as clear as his grandmother’s antique phonograph, but it’s got its own personality. The records themselves likely aren’t compatible with the different machines, so he’ll keep both. Make a music corner, right here, to hold everything neatly. And get something cleaner and sturdier than a milkcrate to hold Gerry’s collection. Some of the album art is worthy of hanging on the walls, if he can find the energy to get hooks up later. 

Would Gerry have been amused by Jon’s fussy antique? His grandmother would have called Gerry’s little plastic player  _ disrespectful towards the music _ . Jon likes them both.

_ In another life _ , he thinks, hyper aware of the nearly-familiar weight of the solid ring on his finger. The ghost of a person existing in a slowly forming outline as he surveys the home Gerry had left behind. A secondhand understanding of him, rather than third from the eyes of those he saved and frightened over the years. Connections that could have been, but never will be.

Curiosity runs deep in Jon, so once the records are clean and returned to their crate, he flips the record and moves on. Gets his hair under a wrap against the dust. Surveys the space. 

Jon knows what to do, here. How to clean out a home left behind. The first time, it was his parent’s duplex. The second, his grandmother’s house. This time he doesn’t have her here to talk about them; he doesn’t have Georgie to talk about his grandmother. There is no one beside him in this loss. Gerard Keay had not left anyone behind at all. They had touched so many lives, saved so many people, yet none knew to mourn them. There was only Jon.

That was a burden he’d never expected to bear, for all that he’d accidentally held Gerry in his heart, but he’s glad to do it. 

He’ll let the light in.

The window sashes come down first. The dust clinging to them is simply too much for him to suffer through. Massive black-out curtains with sheets of black, lacy velvet patterned with roses pinned over top. Cheap, tacky things that are just so absolutely on brand that Jon can’t feel anything but fond of them. He sits on the chair he dragged over to stand on and removes the pins and sets the fabric aside to be washed. The undersides have been sunbleached nearly gray in stripes that follow the voluminous folds. Jon is not an experienced goth; he isn’t about to fuss with dyes and chemicals and stained bathtubs over the unseen undersides of the curtains. Hopefully they darken again in the wash.

Once the curtains are gone from all the windows, Jon has to take a break. He’s tired. He gets tired so easily, nowadays. The unexpected emotional exhaustion of the last few days, the jetlag, the unceremonious revelations of a quietly fading humanity, the end of the world - it’s all a little much. But somehow, with midday sunlight flooding the strange, dusty loft of a not-quite-stranger, Jon feels more settled. Buzzing mind distracted with the newness. Shaky body tuned to the expectation of rote physical labor and the true exhaustion of overused muscles he knows is coming. This is a safehouse. This is Gerry’s safehouse. Jon is safe here. For a time.

Safer than anywhere else, at any rate.

The first streams of sunlight in years reveal a surprisingly spacious studio. A good bit larger than Jon’s old apartment, but all one single, wide space. Open enough for him to comfortably maneuver in his wheelchair without having to move any of the sparse furniture if he doesn’t want to. Dark wood floors and dingy off-white walls. Smoke stained ceiling. Dusty chandelier of glass crystals that casts glittering planes of light when the sun strikes it. It’s surprisingly stately, elegant against the dark minimalism of the rest of the loft. Nothing like the retrofitted brass chandeliers of his grandmothers’ house, but there’s a quaintness to it that lends the near-empty space the same sort of character as the heavy drapes. Gerry’s character.

A small bed fills one corner, positioned where the sleeper can easily keep an eye on the door. Black sheets and a thick black comforter. Good a place as any to start. Allows him to sit down for a spell, at the least. There’s nowhere good to set his crutches, so he just leans them on the unwashed wall and hopes they don’t slide. How did Gerry get on without a nightstand?

The springs creak comically. The pillow is a firm brick of a thing that makes Jon grimace to imagine sleeping on. It’s the worst pillow he’s ever leaned on. Gerry must have dreamed of hitting their head on pavement every night. 

Focusing on pain was a bad idea - his right hand is aching. Knee and hip tight with the promise of nothing good. 

He packs up the bedset slowly. Reusing them would be weird, even for him. Especially for him. He shakes the dust out of the comforter, considers the significantly smaller size of the bed and sighs at how his quilts will brush the floor. Probably better to switch it out for his own. He pulls the last loose sheet off and discovers that Gerry has no bedframe.

Jon stares at the bare mattress absently. If Georgie were here, he’d make a joke about his taste in partners. If his grandmother were here, she would have beat him to the punch with a slow shake of her head. As it is, there is only Jon. He can’t think of anything funny to say, other than his own lack of surprise.

This is where he will sleep tonight. Where Gerry will never sleep again.

Would they have shared this bed? It’s awfully thin. Squeaks every time he moves. Jon needs space to spread out and Gerry had been wearing compression clothes for their burns. They probably wouldn’t have done a good job of sharing space at night. Jon hasn’t slept in the same bed as someone else since Georgie and her ridiculous king mattress that took up almost her entire dorm room. They had cuddled sparingly. Between Jon’s pain and insomnia and Georgie’s ridiculous body heat, they had usually settled on either end and sometimes held hands in the middle while Jon mocked something he read and Georgie watched trash TV. That feels both so long ago and far too close.

But the question remains - and it’s tinged just funny enough that it’s not too serious to consider, but - what does it say about Jon’s taste in lovers, that what is functionally his marriage bed is two top mattresses stacked directly on the floor? Why was this unexpected whirlwind relationship with a near-stranger the most uplifting thing that’s happened to him in months - in years?

The air conditioning pops on and jolts him out of his thoughts. Cold air filters up from the vent behind the bed and hits his hand, half covered as he struggles to fold the over-large fitted sheet neatly. The cold wraps around his fingers, chilling him to the bone instantly, dragging his memory back. The distinctly person-shaped cold spot, the feeling of their hands curving gently under Jon’s in mimic of holding his shaking hands steady as they examine the cheap tacky ring together. Gerry had decided it was the one, and Jon had agreed, based more on the sight of Gerry’s lip rings sliding out from where they had drawn them into their mouth in thought as they smiled. Their eyes glittered with amusement and the lightness of death - and a growing excitement for a hilarious sham of a wedding that will end with a wet city street getting wetter as Gerry and Julia instruct them all on how to properly pour one out for Gerry.

Then, just the two of them, newlyweds, walking down the boulevard together, Gerry’s hand held out and phasing through Jon’s occasionally, leaving him cold as they found the perfect place to burn their page and release them.

_ Ridiculous _ . Jon is - ridiculous. He rubs the chill from his hand. Drops the bags of bedding by the door. 

Getting too maudlin. Back to work.

A distinctly pre-owned sewing machine and a crate full of fabric rest along the opposite wall. Cut sheets and torn tees and ancient jeans. Projects halted in media res. The seat for the machine is a surprisingly comfortable armchair in seashell pink velvet, badly worn but serviceable. There’s no reason other than genuine interest in Gerry’s life that guides Jon to look through the projects. A thin black fabric that’s nearly mesh with the outline of a bat winged shirt on it. Jeans half embroidered with black eyes on black denim, folded near the bottom. Obviously, there’s no chance of them fitting Jon.

Is that weird? To be thinking about wearing the clothes of a ghost - a dead partner - a dead friend - who he barely knew? Jon fiddles with the ring, holding some sort of wrap skirt that needs hemming. He’d been a bit of a clothes stealer with Georgie. Would probably do it again, if he ever got himself together enough for a new relationship. This wasn’t exactly a question he thought to ask during their brief elopement. Didn’t come up in the pre-nuptials they never would have needed.

But Jon is a weird person, he knows. Kidnapped, and come back with significantly nicer skin than he left with, save for all the trauma. Kidnapped again, and come back with the ghost of a spouse tied to his finger. A legacy of Leitners, painted in blood, now bound to him - or burned by him, he’s still not sure.

For a joke of a thing, he’s awfully preoccupied with his already-ended marriage. But it was a wedding. A genuine, if tongue in cheek, proposal. A ring. A party. A wedding. A funeral. Only a ring and a safehouse and a stranger’s clothes are left behind.

But he’s here, isn’t he? And yes, it does feel like the right thing to do, to pick up the pieces of Gerry’s lost life and honor them in what little ways he can. But is he doing it right? Is this coping? Is Jon coping like a human would? Or is moving into your inexplicably dead partner-of-a-day’s safehouse and going through the detritus of their life with far, far too much emotional investment maybe not normal?

Should Jon take the ring off?

Well, he could do that and begin wearing all these conveniently-provided mourning clothes in honor of his tragically dead ghost partner. Honestly, Gerry would probably think it funny. Fitting. _ Dead serious _ , they had intoned, dark eyes shining with genuine mischief. They were that sort of person, to find humor and freedom in death. Jon hopes they are free.

Actually. Jon is by definition a widower. Or a widow. Depends on the day, honestly. But. He has that option. His grandmother had worn black for the rest of her life, after his grandfather passed. Jon is no stranger to mourning customs. There’s a comfort to be found in an established routine meant to facilitate healing. He mostly has darker colored clothing anyway; it’s no chore or exhaustive effort to follow a tradition he had sincerely hoped he was done with having to observe. 

Jon is getting tired of death. He feels like he’s spent more of his life in mourning than out of it, some days. The observances of grief are more familiar to him than optimism. Black it is. 

Either way, Jon barely knows how to use a sewing machine, and these projects are not his to complete. They return to their crate in neat bundles, and he replaces the cover on the machine. Fills a bucket with water and throws himself into scrubbing the filthy windows and walls and floor instead of thinking.

He’s collapsed on the little pink chair for what he tells himself will be a quick break when he notices it. With the slant of the sunlight cutting through the clean windows so brightly, there is a distinct pattern to the shinier spots on the wall above the bed. Jon had dismissed them as flaws in the paint, or the effects of aging, but now he can tell that there is something there.  _ Something _ , because whenever he tries to look directly at it, he finds himself blinking down at the floor placidly. Forcing himself to focus on it makes his eyes twitch away so quickly it nearly gives him vertigo. But in his peripherals he can almost see it - an odd, stylized eye with an ellipses of words or symbols in a halo around it. There’s not much hope of him reading it. He thinks he knows its purpose, at any rate.

The view from the freshly washed windows is actually somewhat nice, at least. Different from the area around the institute, and the kitchen window boasts a good view of the open, graying skies. No rain. Little symbols etched carefully in every windowpane.

Jon takes a real break late in the day. There’s a small table with a pair of charmingly mismatched chairs near the kitchen area as the last of the furniture. The spartan accommodations promise easier cleaning, at least. He sits on a wobbly kitchen stool with a glass clearly liberated from a local bar that he refuses to put on the table because Gerry didn’t keep coasters. The little table is a cheap, flimsy wreck, and there is more than enough space here for his mother’s dining set to finally come out of storage.

His hands shake from the work, the familiar tremble replacing the drifting numbness from that morning. The promised thunderstorm of pain has finally broken over his leg, a solid 5/10, and it radiates all the way down from his hip, punishment for the continuously poor treatment of his body over the last week. He’ll probably be using the wheelchair tomorrow instead of fussing with his prosthetic, now that he isn’t stuck in a vehicle. The foldaway in his office is closer than the nicer one in his flat, and he can probably make it there on crutches. Check in with everyone briefly. Or maybe he’ll just ignore Elias and take a lie-in day. That sounds nice. 

The sudden rumble of a train jolts Jon back into focus, and he turns his attention back to task. If he gets any more distracted, he’ll be all night with it. Not going to be able to do much tomorrow in exchange, so he might as well make the space more comfortable. Time for a new record.

There is a small pile of menus on the table, an empty glass at the seat across from him that thankfully only held water once, and a pair of novelty cat shaped salt and pepper shakers. Most of the restaurant menus are local fare. Two cheap pizza-and-wing dives, and no less than four French takeout and delivery. These are marked up, entrees circled, with the occasional comment in thin, neat writing. Jon’s French  _ should  _ be a little rusty; he hasn’t spoken it since his grandmother passed, but it reads as easily as anything else, these days. The commentary on the entrees is mostly positive.

Good Lord, has Jon married a fan of French food?

_ Well, _ he thinks wryly, setting the menus back on Gerry’s table,  _ never meet your heroes _ .

The kitchen - as such - exists in the space beneath the large window over the train station roof. A minifridge - empty, thankfully, except for three different types of mustard and a single BBQ sauce packet, all of which go into the trash - a long wooden counter, a portable burner in good condition, a microwave in poor condition, and an industrial sink in the center. The cabinets and drawers under the counter are the only storage space in the loft aside from the closet, and are taken up by a single saucepan - except for a small cardboard box of polaroids.

Jon sets them aside for another day. Does not get distracted.

The dinnerware is all plastic, aside from a small collection of bar glasses. If Jon wasn’t already deeply sad for the short, brutal life Gerry lived, this would have done it for him. The lack of a bedframe he can - well, no, actually, he can’t excuse that. But this? This goes beyond sad and straight into pathetic; this rushed, uncomfortable life Gerry was forced to live. This is unacceptable. Jon is bringing in his entire kitchen and getting a normal sized fridge. The countertop burner can stay because it looks convenient to clean, but a new model wouldn’t be remiss. 

It’s during this horrified thought process that Jon realizes that he does not, in fact,  _ have  _ to live here. The thought has honestly not occurred to him until this moment. But as soon as it appears, he sets it aside. He wants to live here. Not just for the free rent and utilities, though that is a major point in favor, but because it was so sparse and sad, and he can make it better. Not that Gerry is around to appreciate it, but sprucing up what’s left of their life and making it clean and fresh and livable feels so much more right than simply cleaning it all up and forgetting about it.

They sold his parents’ home immediately. Jon no longer remembers it, save for brief flashes of faint childhood memory. He spent five short years there, and after, so much of his life changed so rapidly that the honor of being considered his childhood home went to his grandmother’s house. She had planned out her will well in advance, and had debated with Jon about the fate of her house for several hours before he admitted that he likely couldn’t afford the upkeep for more than a few years. Then with being away at university and later shifting through the job markets in London - well. He misses it, but has had plenty of time to let it go. Had kept the things that were meaningful, and set the empty shell of the home he grew up in free on the fortieth day after her death.

But this place?

This was Gerry’s safehouse; Jon is going to make it safe again. He’s choosing to do this.

He’s got his work cut out for him, certainly, but there is not a doubt in his mind that it is worth the fuss. It is, however, a much larger and longer project than what he can accomplish today, so he settles for cleaning everything thoroughly and checking the pipes, then moves on. Does not linger around the box of photos.

The bathroom is clean, aside from the dust and an underhand style toilet paper, which Jon fixes immediately. Gerry’s towels are black. A thin, doorless closet holds the toiletries. A well-stocked first aid kit with expired medication. A makeup bag. A box of unused black hair dye. Soap is in the third crate, tucked under the open pedestal sink, all hotel samples. The mirror is cracked rather dramatically, like it had once fallen before being anchored securely. Probably shook off the wall due to the vibration of the rails.

Reminded of the trains, Jon goes to turn up the music a little. He’s beginning to understand the appeal. The ambience of human life and activity so close but neatly withheld is nearly intoxicating. But the noise will be something that takes time to grow comfortable with. Jon’s willing to dedicate time to learning it.

He’s almost done. Two neat piles wait by the door for whenever he will have the energy to get one to the trash and the other to the laundromat. Maybe later this week, if he plays his cards right. He’ll probably end up arranging for a pick up service for the washing. The curtains are heavy individually, and Jon is tired just looking at them. He might not like his limits, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t aware of them.

He eats cold pizza for dinner and seriously considers how long he’s willing to live without an automated dishwasher. The box of photos waits patiently in the other chair.

And then, all at once, all that is left is the wardrobe closet. Jon takes the latest record off and his ears ring in the sudden near silence. Sets the player away for the night. The mirrored doors to the closet rattle on their tracks, the space around one handle liberally patched with duct tape. Gerry’s clothes are mostly black, but there are a few dark tartan plaids, a pair of unusual Hawaiian shirts, and a few random items in hot pink. Jon plucks out the softest flannel his shaking fingers land on and ends up with a dark green, pink, and black tartan jacket that looks like it would fit Martin. What would be artfully oversized on Gerry swamps Jon like a bathrobe. It smells faintly like a different brand of cigarettes than what he sometimes smokes and something warm. It’s perfect.

Jon showers using some of Gerry’s horrible, horrible soap and a kitchen chair he had to drag in, wraps himself up in the jacket, then passes into an immediate, exhausted sleep. Dreams of everything he has done wrong.

Gerry isn’t there.

And when Jon wakes, he never will be. Gerry exists in this safehouse, in the box of polaroids that Jon will spend the whole day going through, in the clearer stability in Jon’s heart. It isn’t fair, and it hurts, but he can make it be enough. For now, it will have to be.

When Jon wakes, there are two banker’s boxes worth of unmarked cassettes on the table, and cobwebs in the corners. He decides to take that lie-in.

Tomorrow, Jon will face the Archives again. Today, he will mourn Gerry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gerry might not have a bedframe, but he has jons heart uwu
> 
> Next Chapter: A first date is considered


	2. First Date

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which three first dates are considered from the outside

Perhaps not surprisingly, it’s Tim who is the hardest to wrangle out for drinks after Jon returns. Martin gets it, he really does.  _ Objectively _ . Repeated trauma and violence and clashing with Jon right after - yes, it was pretty bad. It got ugly, at times. Horrible, honestly. But things are better now in some respects, and he and Jon even had time away from each other to cool down for a bit. Not that it had been all that great for Jon, but it should have helped Tim get his bearings.

It had not.

Now, Martin just sort of wants to bash the two of them together until they talk it out. Drinks at Tim’s second favorite pub is a perfect excuse to force them to talk. Hopefully. If everyone could get along for just one night, Martin would be happy.

Just  _ one  _ night.

“At least come get drunk in company?” Martin tries again.

“Hm,” Tim says in that hollow, absent tone he’s been using lately. It matches the near-frigid temperature of the document storage room. He continues shifting boxes from the floor to the shelves. When Martin walked in, he was moving them from the shelves to the floor.

Martin sighs.

“Tim, please. Just this once? Even Daisy’s coming, for whatever reason, so please?”

“That supposed to convince me?”

“A little? You don’t have to stay the whole time, or even talk to anyone if you don’t want to. I just want…” he trails off meaningfully. He can’t put what he wants into words, because everything he wants at this point is impossible, up to and including the safety of the entire world. Putting exact emotions into words has never come naturally to Martin, even with all the poetry exercises he’s been doing. He knows when to pick his battles, though, and lets the implications in the silence speak for him.

It’s Tim’s turn to sigh. His is so much more weary than Martin’s was. It mists a little, in the cold room.

“Fine. But only so I don’t have to buy my own lager.”

“Great!” says Martin, probably too quickly, maybe a little too relieved. “Well, we’re heading out in about ten minutes, sooo… I’ll see you at the door?”

“Sure, Martin,” says Tim blandly. Then he forces a breath between his teeth and straightens up a fraction, finally turns and offers a thin smile. “But only for you.” It still sounds wan and tired, but the effort is appreciated.

Martin smiles back, then leaves him to his boxes.

Out in the bullpen, Jon and Melanie are engaged in one of their not-arguments as they struggle with their jackets. Sometimes they get on like a house on fire, and sometimes they aren’t manic. Martin isn’t sure which it is, yet. They’ve been hot and cold all day. It’s usually like that.

Basira sits on her desk, some ridiculously thick book from the Occult Worship section - 130.1 - open on her lap. Daisy lounges beside her against the wall. At least they look ready to go.

“I got Tim. He’ll be out in a moment,” Martin announces, unfolding his scarf.

“What was he even doing back there?” Jon asks with a little frown. Martin shrugs. Not coping, that’s for certain. 

He could ask the same of Jon just as easily. Jon had come in on time instead of early, and then spent the day going between the stacks and his office. Martin had seen the portable whiteboard in there when he went to drop off some tea for him. 

Today he is using his chair, which had alarmed Martin at first, considering the state he got into the last time he was out of office for an extended period, but other than that, he appears to be fine. Well rested, for once. Not the usual amount of sternness in his face.

Whatever Tim was up to, he doesn’t leave them waiting much longer. Jon smiles faintly at him - actually  _ smiles!  _ At  _ Tim!  _ \- before heading out. Tim goes on a confused face journey before blinking into acceptance, shrugging on his leather jacket and following along gamely.

The walk to the pub is quiet, but at least it isn’t awkward. Just - contemplative, really. Not all that much to say, these days. Daisy brings up the rear, which is the only reason Tim stays nearer to Martin instead of straggling. He feels distinctly herded. 

At least it’s a nice night. Not boiling hot anymore, and just close enough to autumn to begin feeling somewhat nostalgic. The sky is very deep purple and the peach-orange street lamps look especially lovely against it. No stars, of course. Not in the city. Martin has actually never really seen the open sky. Not really. Still, there’s something to be said for the business of the city, and he can appreciate that on occasion. 

They catch up to Jon and Melanie at the entrance. Despite using mobility aids, the two of them somehow always manage to outstrip everyone else. Short people energy, Martin assumes. Martin’s a slow walker; likes to appreciate the fresh air. For a central London value of fresh.

Melanie nods at the group and stomps through first to hold the door. Jon wheels in after her, the warm light from the stairwell catching on his glasses and cheekbones for just a moment. Martin wheezes as Daisy bumps into his back, then quickens his pace to follow.

Martin likes this pub. It’s an old establishment in dark wood with deep corners and cosy booths and elegant little stained glass windows. The darkness outside makes it all the more atmospheric. A good vibe for an end-of-summer, nearly-fall sort of place. He’s gotten Jon to lunch with him here a few times out of totally platonic concern for his health, and has always been satisfied by how well he fits the place. The golden lights compliment the warm red undertones of his skin and the general aura meshes well with his aesthetic. The shadowed little booths make for rather intimate lunches.

Actually, this is the first time he’s here with Jon and they aren’t alone together. Not like their lunches were exactly secret or anything, but they were Martin’s - hold on.  _ No _ . No, it’s objectively wrong to be possessive over a shared public place, Martin Blackwood. Sit in the booth and be pleasant. Have a lovely evening getting drinks with your friends before you save the world.

Hm. Not exactly where he thought he’d find himself when he applied. He sits.

“Not to stir the pot so early, but I don’t really want to drink anything Daisy gives me, personally,” Jon offers absently, still fussing with getting his coat on the hook neatly enough for his tastes.

“Uh, yeah, fuck no,” says Melanie at the same time that Martin blurts out “I wouldn’t let you!”

Then he looks up, wincing, but both Basira and Daisy are up at the bar, nearly invisible in the shadows of the thin late night crowd.

“Yeah,” Tim agrees with a massive gusting sigh, pulling himself up from where he’d been practically sliding under the table in his lounge. “I’m not drinking the ACAB Special. We’re getting plastered, and we’re doing it right.” Then he’s gone, too. Martin trusts him to be courteous in whatever he returns with. Tim’s always been a great guy to drink with, for all that he’s been imbibing a little too much lately, in Martin’s opinion. Maybe he’ll cheer up tonight.

With less people around to judge him for it, Martin turns, chin in hand, to Jon. Melanie is on her phone, like she has been often as of late, and not paying attention.

Jon’s only been back for a day, but Martin can tell that something is - different. Not necessarily in a bad way, but there’s just something that leaves Martin feeling a bit off kilter. He seems more - peaceful, somehow. More settled. Like his time in America was some sort of extended vacation. Something about him is lighter in a way that Martin wants to read as optimistic, however tentative. It’s a good look on him. Martin’s glad to see it. But at the same time, he is so  _ curious _ . Jon’s never reacted so positively to time away from the Archives before.

“So,” Martin begins with cultivated awkwardness and half a smile, perfectly aware of the inanity of the question. “How was your day?”

Jon looks up from where he’s unraveling the sole napkin full of silverware left on the table with military precision.

“Unproductive, to say the least. If anything was where it needs to be, I could get things done,” he scoffs.

Melanie snorts and drags her snapback down further over her eyes. Jon starts to squint at her. 

“Ah,” Martin says quickly. “About the same for me, honestly.” There’s much to be done, but they certainly aren’t getting any help from upstairs on it. No new hints have appeared aside from the few things Jon found out in America. The world might end, but all they can do is sit on their hands and wait.

At least Martin’s used to waiting.

It’s given him plenty of time to plan.

Further stilted conversation is abruptly prevented by the solid thump of several pitchers on the table, heralding the return of Tim. Basira follows with a large basket of chips. Daisy is already sat at the very end of the round booth seat, which Martin didn’t notice her doing. She’s abnormally quiet on her feet.

“Okay, folks,” says Tim in what could pass for a normal tone if it wasn’t still a bit subdued. “We got water, old ale, Kopparberg, and Guinness. Have at it.”

Drinks are divided and chips are stolen. Melanie squirts a massive mound of ketchup on a napkin. Basira sets the Anti-Elias jar on the table. Daisy remains on the endseat, watching the open floor. Jon keeps gently scrunching the napkin between his hands like a Victorian maiden with a handkerchief favor and a missing gentleman. Martin watches him fondly. Sips his Kopparberg.

It’s Melanie who breaks the silence. Sets her phone face down on the table decisively in a single, controlled movement, evidently done with whoever she’s been texting all day. Visibly steels herself with a breath.

“So… how did you and Georgie even meet?” she asks Jon, a bit too loudly to be wholly impromptu. Her tone modulation is never certain, and she winces a bit as the words finish leaving her mouth. Eats a chip with quick, angry motions immediately afterwards.

“Yes, how did Oxford Nuisance Jon meet a podcaster, exactly?” Tim adds, just a bit snide. Still smarting from the cordial treatment he got earlier, probably. Jon mouths ‘Oxford Nuisance’ to himself over the lip of his glass.

“She wasn’t a podcastor yet, and you wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he says first to Tim, then to Melanie, a slight smile quirking his lips.

“Oh, come on now, try us,” Tim says, with just a bit too much forced encouragement in his wide gesture to make up for the total apathy in his eyes. He really tries when he’s in the headspace for it; Martin respects that about him.

“I’d like to know,” Basira admits. She listens to  _ What The Ghost! _ in the breakroom on occasion. The first time Martin had walked in and heard the cheesy sound effects and awful puns paired up with Basira’s impassive face, he’d experienced a cognitive dissonance so strong he had to leave the room.

Jon hums and then begins in a discordantly blasé tone: “Well, when we were running from the police through the wood together, we recognized each other from some of our classes, and - “

“No?”

“Now hold on a second -”

“Jon, what the fuck -”

“Back it up here for a moment,” Melanie interrupts, setting one hand flat on the table in the international symbol for a conversational pause. “Say again?”

Jon has the gall to look amused, eyes crinkled at the corners. It’s a good look on him. He stops hiding his smug smile behind his glass and sets it down on a coaster. Dramatic arse.

“Well,” he begins in earnest, bringing one hand up for gesturing. His rings glint in the light. The fresh henna on his skin tells its own intricate tale. His most dramatic voice switches on. “During the month of October, there were these little historical ghost sighting walking tours around Oxford. The last stop on the tour was an abandoned manse said to have been home to a family of slighted ghosts out for vengeance against any who set foot inside. The tour guide was quite the storyteller, and there were plenty of rumors and incidents to work with. Anyway, the tours ran essentially all night, and I didn’t want to be running amok at three in the morning in that weather, so I waited until they took their rest day on the first Wednesday of the month to break in.”

“Oh my god? Jon?”

Jon chuckles absently, clearly fond of the insane memory, and waves them off.

“It was easy to do, since there wasn’t anything of value on the property, so I got in and had a look-around. What I didn’t know at the time was that Georgie had the same idea. She had her first video camera then, back when she thought she wanted to make a more… more Youtube ghost hunting sort of project. I think it was all the video editing that bored her out of it, so she switched to, to audio format. But I digress.

“She’d arrived maybe a few minutes before I did, which was just long enough to move out of the front rooms and be unnoticeable for a while. But of course, with two people moving about in an old, empty house like that, sound carries and echoes. We went through the entire playbook of classic haunted house shenanigans, just barely missing each other the entire time. It was a rather sizable mansion, multiple doors to each room and several staircases to the upper floors, so there was plenty of opportunity for one of us to step on a particularly loud floorboard and the other to come investigating from a completely different direction than the other went. We had no idea there were simply two people in the house. This went on for, oh, maybe not twenty, about fifteen minutes or so? Then a police cruiser pulled up out front to chase off the trespassers who had set off the silent door alarm.

“We both ran for the back door at the same time and collided in the kitchen. It was quite funny, really, gave me half a heart attack. We ended up linking arms and running out the door as soon as we understood what had happened. We got a bit turned around and lost in the wooded orchard of the property before tumbling out onto a side street. Once we could actually stop and breathe for a moment, we introduced ourselves and realized that we had the same major and several classes in common. So, we decided to head down to an all nighter pub Georgie knew was nearby, and, well, we counted that as our first date. We moved in together on Halloween.”

He ends with a shrug and sips his drink. Melanie stares. Martin doesn’t. Jon. Moves fast. Good to know.

“I don’t know whether to laugh,” Tim says idly. “That explains so much about you from Research. Fuck, the shit you had us pulling for follow up…”

“Oh, I was originally in the Fieldwork Division before Elias benched me. In retrospect, I suppose it must not have been as much about the property damage and trespassing fines as he claimed.”

“That’s a quid,” Basira reminds him.

“Oh, right,” Jon digs a crumpled clump of bills out of his pocket, squints at them in the low lighting, and hands them all off. Basira pulls the Anti-Elias Jar from the edge of the table and adds them.

“Wait, wait, wait,” says Martin, shaking himself out of his Jon-induced stupor. “Weren’t you on crutches in uni, too?”

“Yes, but if having limited mobility could stop me from making reckless decisions, it would have happened already.”

That. Is an incredibly good point, which Martin is forced to concede and Melanie toasts him for it. Sometimes Jon can be right, even if he is never reasonable. Especially since he follows it up with:

“If you think that’s stupid of me, you should have seen what I got up to in the wheelchair. Drove my poor grandmother up the wall.”

Martin is almost afraid to ask. Jon had ended up in a chair for a few weeks again after Prentiss’ worms mangled his prosthetic and added even more damage to his leg, and Martin had practically needed to lock him out to force him to take the recommended amount of time off. Jon’s defense of ‘well, I’d rather have access to the files than be trapped at home without any information about the things that caused our injuries,’ was, in fact, not the argument he thought it was, despite the amount of medical equipment squirrelled away in his desk drawers. Martin understands, to an extent, but they literally have scanners and email. For all of Jon’s posturing, Martin won that one just as easily as usual.

But if Jon had even less impulse control as a child, then…

“Oh, please tell me you painted flames on the sides and went drag racing,” Tim pleads, leaning heavily on the table, looking more present than Martin has seen him in a while. Brighter, somehow. Good.

“No,” says Jon, all fond nostalgia. “I would sneak out of the house and get caught in the Abernathy’s orchard, climbing their trees. All the firefighters in the area knew me by name. In my defense, I could absolutely have climbed down on my own, just not in the timeframe anyone wanted from me.”

_ God. _

“Jon,” Melanie says after a moment of awed silence, setting a hand on his thin shoulder, “you’re a ledge.”

“Thank you, Melanie. I’m glad someone understands,” Jon says primly enough that Martin can almost tell he’s joking this time. The slight, tipsy slur to his words does wonders for softening his tone.

“I really don’t know what to say to that,” Basira offers.

“Give them their quid back!” Tim cajoles, raising his glass in salute.

Basira shrugs and takes the top off the jar.

“Oh, that’s fine,” Jon says with a wave. “That’s all Elias’ money, anyway.”

“What,” says Martin.

“Hold on, have you been using the institute card? You drew cash off of it?” Tim asks.

“Yes? It’s the least we’re owed, at this point. He hasn’t confronted me about it in a way that matters, so I don’t care. I also… also Beheld the information for one of his offshore accounts, so we have that as well. Forgot to mention. All rounds on him, I should think.”

Basira slowly puts the lid back on. “I think that about covers all the mentioning you just did.”

“Oh, good. Sorry, we got off topic - why were you asking about Georgie?” Jon turns to Melanie, looking nothing but curious, even if the weight of that look is oddly physical, even on the opposite side of the booth. It’s almost more noticeable in the intimate lighting, how dark his eyes are. Melanie looks away very quickly, squeezes one fist slowly. Relaxes it.

“Oh, uh. Didn’t actually know you two were ex’s until she mentioned something earlier. Just wondered about it, I guess.” A good excuse. She clears her throat and tips her glass around. “Met her at a content creator convention after a panel, for what it’s worth.”

Jon nods and raises his glass at her. “A professional setting! Probably a better first meeting, all things considered. She is single right now.”

If Melanie had been drinking, she would have choked. As it is, she splutters soundlessly for a few moments, drops her chip back into the depleted ketchup mound, accidentally catches Tim’s eyebrows raising and Basira’s slow nod from across the table, and promptly whips her head around to glare at Jon. Martin leans in around him to grab her attention.

Then, because Martin understands something integral about Melanie King and doesn’t want another argument, he winks. Her mouth drops open, and two nearly perfect circles of intense flush redden her cheeks. Martin’s a bit jealous - his whole face goes red. Probably is right now, actually.

At least Jon is distracted trying to get his phone out of his trouser pocket when his enormous cardigan keeps getting in the way. The sleeves have been rolled up so many times they make huge cuffs around his thin wrists when he finally succeeds in retrieving it. It does not fit him at all, but looks very cute, in Martin’s opinion.

“Do you want to see her cat?” he asks without looking up, pushing his empty glass toward the pitchers for a refill. 

“Yes,” Melanie blurts out, obviously glad for the distraction.

“I’d love to see a cat,” Martin offers.

“We should use Elias’ card to get a cat,” says Tim, then immediately drops a bill on the table before Basira can finish raising her finger toward him.

“Not sure we should trap some poor animal with us, actually,” Martin muses.

“Emotional support cat, Martin. Think about it.”

“Here he is,” says Jon, holding his phone out on the table at near arm’s length like the old folks at the care home do to show pictures of their grandchildren. His ring and silvery-pink scars catch the light. Tim and Basira scoot closer around the booth, and they all lean in. The cat in question is a huge gray thing with a dignified, squashed face and bright orange eyes.

“His name is The Admiral. He’s about 10 years old, now, I think?”

“ _ The  _ Admiral?” Melanie asks.

“Yes, Georgie found him in a box when we were still dating, but she’d never had a cat before, so I got to name him. The box had some brand on it that included the word - the word ‘Admiral’, so I kept it. I hoped it would encourage respectability and honor in him, but it did not. Absolute menace,” Jon’s voice is impossibly fond, warm and open with it.

The photos are surprisingly not too repetitive. The cat stretched out in a bright sunbeam. The cat taking up an entire small coffee table, laying on what are clearly statement folders and curled around a cup of tea. The cat held up in Jon’s arms, head leaning on his shoulder with both paws on either side of his neck in a kitty hug. It really is a huge thing, with long fluffy fur to boot.

The next photo features what must be Georgie Barker - rumpled and in pink polka dot pyjamas holding an enormous mound of gray fur over one shoulder like a sack of potatoes, yawning as she walks into a bright chrome kitchen.

“How many pictures do you have?” Melanie asks, not subtle in the slightest with her timing. Unlike Martin, who has by honest accident put his arm over the top of the booth around Jon so he could lean in and see better. They aren’t even touching, but Martin is suddenly extremely aware of that proximity. Probably be weird to correct it now, right? He should stay still. 

“Well, I was there for a few months, so quite a number. Ah, we don’t have to view them all, of course. Most aren’t very exciting, anyway,” he starts to lower his phone a bit sheepishly.

“No, I want to see them,” Martin gushes encouragingly. Jon likes to talk, and drunk Jon likes to overshare if prompted in any way. Martin likes learning things about Jon.

“Well, alright. I also have his baby book at home, if you want to see his kitten photos.” Like that. Martin never would have guessed that in a million years. But now that the image of a younger Jon painstakingly making a scrapbook for a kitten exists in his head, it will never leave. It feels etched there, pinned down in exactness by Jon’s full attention on Martin. It’s almost too much.

“Why would you make a book for a cat?” Daisy snorts.

Jon says something in reply, but Martin is completely distracted by Jon’s lockscreen photo when it pops up from his phone sitting idle too long.

“Uh, who was that?” he interrupts.

“Hm?”

“Jon, your lockscreen. Who was that guy?”

“Oh!” Jon brightens considerably as he turns the screen back on. “That’s Gerard Keay.”

The longer look allows Martin to really drink in the photo. Just really take it all in. A selfie. An offcenter selfie of Jon, just a bit blurry, a little glitched around the edges, in the middle of getting his cheek kissed by a person who is blatantly transparent and about as stereotypically ghost-like as he can imagine. The Jon in the photo looks incredibly pleased.

The Jon in the booth beside him looks fond, maybe a bit bittersweet, as he rests his empty glass on his cheek, clinking against his glasses, and smiles at the photo.

“I thought he was dead?” Martin asks because he isn’t sure where else to start.

“Who’s dead? Is it me?” Tim asks brightly, thumping his own empty glass on the table.

“No, Tim. It’s Gerry. I met them back when I was - when I was in America,” Jon says.

“Looks a bit, uh,” says Martin, too petty to keep quiet, too polite to say anything to Jon’s face about the  _ extremely  _ goth ghost in the intimate photo.

“Hm? Oh, yes. They were a ghost at the time, so most of the photos simply didn’t turn out correctly. This was one of the best ones. I have others,” And he has an entire folder labeled  _ Gerry <3 _ that he opens immediately. It’s beside  _ The Admiral <3 _ .

“I’m sorry, what? A ghost? A real ghost? And you didn’t even say anything?” Melanie asks sharply.

“Well, they were a ghost when I met them, and they chose to move on. And it’s not like - like that part was really relevant to any of you. Although, they were the one who told me about that storage unit, actually.” Jon admits.

“You said it was in some receipt at the Usher Foundation,” Basira reminds him. Jon shrugs, unrepentant.

“I mean, I figured it would only complicate telling you all the important parts? If it wasn’t about the Unknowing, I left it out. Besides, it was just an excuse to get away from Julia and Trevor with all my limbs intact for once, so it shouldn’t really matter all that much.”

“...that you met an actual ghost?” Melanie asks, confused.

“Oh, no, sorry. I meant the wedding,” Jon corrects, sliding his glass toward Basira for another refill and taking off his glasses to clean them.

Martin coughs on his drink and Tim chokes on a chip. Basira allows Jon the end of the pitcher, but holds his glass hostage as she stares him down. She holds that position until he puts his glasses back on and notices.

“Jon, I don’t appreciate being lied to.”

“It wasn’t any type of - of  _ lie _ . It simply wasn’t any of your business, Basira,” he says primly, looking away very conspicuously, practically pouting, and pushing lightly at a lock of his hair. Good god, he really can’t lie for shit, can he? And being drunk makes it all the worse. Martin is almost impressed by his audacity.

“Tell us about it then?” Basira asks less than she informs that he will. 

“Fine, fine. It’s what I wanted to tell you all about tonight, anyway,” he relents with a deep sigh, gesturing for Basira to unhand his drink. He drops his phone in Melanie’s hand with a vague wave. She starts slowly scrolling through a gallery of blurry ghost photos as if in a trance.

“My hands’re tired, you can look through them on your own. Most of them are blur - are bad. Didn’t come out right. But, yes, if you all really must know, I married Gerard Keay in Las Vegas -” The total stillness at the table would have better suited a painting than a group of very confused archival assistants. A blob of ketchup falls from the chip frozen halfway to Melanie’s mouth. 

“- they wanted to spit on their eugenics-obsessed, homophobic mother’s grave one more time. Don’t think it’s legally binding since they were dead at the time, but I changed Keay to Sims in all their cross-references in honor of their decision earlier today. Trevor Herbert and Julia Montauk were our witnesses - oh, they’re avatars of the hunt now, by the way. Very close grandfather-granddaughter relationship, it was really sweet to see once they stopped holding us hostage. Trevor gave a really nice best man speech, I was touched. Julia let me wear her leather jacket for the ceremony so Gerry and I could match. One of the anatomy students was there, and later I got a congratulations card from Nikola Orsinov… actually, I have the wedding party on tape, as well as the screaming phone call I got from Elias ten minutes later, if you want to listen to it.”

“Oh, sorry, I don’t have any more bills for the jar,” he adds into the absolute silence that follows. Basira reaches around Melanie and takes his half emptied glass back, which he releases with a sigh and then gracefully accepts the water she gives him instead.

“You… married a ghost,” says Melanie, eventually, in a stilted, leading tone.

Jon hums in agreement and holds up his left hand. Sure enough, that god-awful, ugly faux silver ring he’s been wearing is positioned on his ring finger beside the plain black band on his middle. The bulky shine of it compliments his Prentiss scars, somehow. Martin had just assumed he likes weird rings and was only keeping them both on his left hand since his right is still healing from the burn.

“Why is it an emo band?” Daisy asks, sounding fascinated against her own wishes.

“Oh, Gerry picked it out for me. We only needed one on account of them being a ghost, so they chose it for the pun. It’s Black Veil Brides, you see, after the mourning traditions of the...” And then he’s off. Martin can only half listen. Gaze frozen on Jon’s gesturing hand, with his  _ wedding ring  _ and henna, which Martin had thought was a wedding thing but just couldn’t tell, with Jon.

Lord above. Gerard Keay.  _ Gerry _ , fond all over. Gerard Sims.

Martin stares down at the gallery of photos, unseeing. A very tall, lanky white person with long, pin straight hair dyed black after a good three inches of blonde show at the roots. Snakebite piercings - which Martin has always admired - and an eyebrow bar. Long chain earrings and heaps of tacky silver rings. Clothes all black, of course. Slightly blurry, slightly smudged intense makeup around their eyes and thin, smiling lips. Their eyes might be naturally dark and strange, or that may be another effect of being a ghost. They are, in Martin’s humble opinion, not that attractive. Okay, maybe a little. In that  _ androgynous bad-boy goth punk uni-date _ sort of way. 

They look like someone who would shotgun with a stranger in an alleyway and say things like  _ death is my passion _ , and make it sound meaningful, not anything close to  _ marriage material _ .

Gerard Keay.

A legacy of kicking ass, taking names, surviving the odds, and burning Leitners.

Gerry Sims.

Martin feels distinctly unmoored. Maybe he should have accepted some alcohol after all.

“Well!” says Tim, and then nothing else for a long while.

“Huh. And… how did that all… happen?” Basira asks slowly, like she isn’t sure she wants to know. Martin isn’t sure he wants to know.

“It wasn’t another haunted house, was it?” Melanie asks, and she at least appears to be enjoying this now. She keeps turning his phone around and peering at the pictures from odd angles, an intense concentration on her face. She picks up her own phone and starts texting images to herself.

“Oh, no, they were haunting a book. I had to summon them,” Jon informs them placidly, just sort of staring absently into the middle distance over the table. His hands in his lap are very slowly fiddling with the ring. It’s seriously the ugliest ring Martin has ever seen. He hates it for normal reasons.

“Okay, wrong, I need more details,” Melanie says, now snapping photos of Jon’s screen with her own phone and squinting at the results.

“Well, this one wasn’t as fun. But Julia picked me up from the bus terminal because an agent of the Stranger was following me. It was pretending to be a cop, actually? I’m certain it was one of Lionel Elliot’s anatomy students. Anyway, they let me use this Leitner they had on them to contact Gerry as a thank you for being bait. It’s just as - just as awful a Leitner as one can imagine, and it required reading out the private last thoughts of the ghost trapped within in order to summon them. After we talked, and, yes, they told me about the storage unit then, Gerry requested to be set free from the book.”

“They didn’t want to remain trapped as a spirit, eternally deathless, in their mother’s book. So I tore out their page and hid it. We’d banked on the Hunters not checking since they expressed discomfort in using the book, but they did. Somehow… honestly, it was mostly Trevor? But somehow, the decision was reached that the reason I had been seeking Gerry out was because we were tragically parted lovers and I had been traveling the globe searching for them, hoping to find them alive somewhere. In exchange for letting us walk free after stealing from the book, Trevor and Julia offered to be our bodyguards while we got a ceremony together before setting Gerry free, as a sort of last date night for us. It was very dramatic. Shakespearian comedy of errors, practically. Worked out alright in the end.”

“Huh. What the fuck,” Melanie says happily, now scrolling through what are clearly Jon’s wedding photos. He looks really, really good in red. Martin can’t look away.

“...I don’t know the answer to this question, and that disturbs me a little, but you and Gerry weren’t lovers, right?” Tim asks.

Oh, huh. Martin hadn’t even considered that. He didn’t know Jon prior to his transfer to the Archives. Had he been in mourning this entire time? For a goth?

It’s a strange idea, but somehow not a disharmonious one. Jon’s hands continue fiddling with his sleeves on his lap, trembling whenever they still. Martin sets his glass down slowly, staring at that. If there is one thing that had endeared Jon to him from their very first meeting, it is that he is not self-conscious about his body. He isn’t the type to make himself small to avoid attention, nor does he make himself an abject tragedy. His hands shake, he can’t walk without assistance, he stutters; these are simply facts. He does not hide his hands from them, will do stretches and ask for others to handle things when he can’t without fuss. He’s the opposite of Martin’s mother, but he doesn’t want to think about her right now.

And right now, Jon is hiding his trembling hands from them, trying to stop himself. He’s been holding tight to his glass or squeezing that napkin all night, in fact.

There is only one thing Jon actually tries to hide from them.

“No, we’ve never met. Read plenty about them in Statements, though. Since their death was then-unconfirmed, I had been hoping to find them alive. But I was a few years too late on that front,” Jon says, and Martin can see it now; the tight corners of his eyes, the forced even tone of his voice, the unhappy shake of his hands.

Tim is nodding over his own glass of water, looking to have sobered up somewhat over the course of the conversation. Jon continues to be absolutely toasted: is it just his usual lack of moderation, or something else? “Read every one they turned up in, yeah. Have to admire the guy,”

“Certainly proactive. What killed them, in the end?” Basira asks.

“Oh, it was brain cancer, actually. They had a perfectly human death, in the end. It was Gertrude who bound them in the book, after,” Jon says in that same even tone of false levity.

“Damn,” says Basira absently. “Sorry for your loss,”

“Should have taken bereavement leave, Jon. I would have,” says Tim.

“Oh, I tried, but Elias wouldn’t let me,”

“Hm. Sounds like a problem for HR,” Daisy says.

“You think so?” Jon asks slowly, like he isn’t sure whether or not she’s joking but also unsure if he’s joking about the possibility of drowning Elias in HR’s special brand of paperwork hell.

Martin slowly reaches over and covers his hand, untangling it from his sweater gently. Jon makes a small noise, just barely loud enough to hear, and settles. His hand grips back tight, still shaking, but his shoulders loosen a bit. He blinks up at Martin, his eyes very dark and shining, reflecting the lights unnaturally.

“I’m sorry they had to die like that,” Martin tells him quietly.

Jon just looks up at him for a long moment before letting out a breath. Says, “Thank you, Martin,” and squeezes his hand lightly. Martin smiles at him. Jon’s mouth twitches just the littlest bit.

“Focus, Jon,” Melanie says, snapping once to get him back on track. “Ghost. What were they like, physically? Could you touch them?” Jon blinks back at her, relaxing slowly in his seat, looking a bit dazed but less tense. Martin keeps his hand.

“Not… exactly? There was sort of a, sort of a dense cold spot where they appeared to be? Hang on, you’ve seen ghosts before,”

“From a distance and also they shot me. I’m not seeing any videos here, but you said you had audio recordings?”

“Oh, yes, I have plenty. I have their Statement, too. Should probably get that filed instead of sitting in the safehouse,” he muses.

“Why do you have a safehouse?” Tim asks.

“The one down by the station or the one on Oroby Lane?” Daisy asks.

Jon - and everyone else - spends a moment staring at her. She shrugs, slides her empty glass to the middle of the table. Unrepentant.

“Long story short,” Jon says finally. “But it turns out that Emma Harvey was really talented at money laundering before Gertrude burned her alive, and Gerry got all her safehouses and supply areas that are still being covered by the institute's money to this day. So if anyone is looking for alternative free housing, I have the keys to two more places a bit further from the institute. I’ve been staying at the loft near the train station because I like the ambient noise and that’s where Gerry’s record collection is. Which, Melanie - you should come over some time to listen to, I think you would really appreciate most of these albums. Local garage metal and prog rock, right up your alley. Oh, and Martin, I know you like retro ‘aesthetic’ things and Gerry had everything from 8-track tapes to vinyl, so we could - Martin? Are you alright?”

“Yep,” Martin squeaks. He had watched the slow-mo sympathetic wave of  _ oh, this is going to suck, isn’t it? _ make its way to him from across the table, but only has the time to think  _ huh  _ before the tsunami of it hit him square in the chest. Jon makes direct, blinding eye contact and Martin manages to save just enough dignity to not spit his drink out. He does have to clear his throat and set it down, however. Jon’s probably forgotten that they are holding hands still.

Since he’s still caught in Jon’s gaze, time sort of stops happening and everything other than Jon is a bit fuzzy. It probably would have been that way anyway, because did Jon just ask Martin to come over and listen to his record collection? His dead spouse’s record collection? With Martin?  _ Like right now? _

There’s a lot going on there, and Martin is genuinely unsure about how in the actual hell to feel about it. Jon is not in a good place right now, but he never makes empty promises.

“Wow, inviting us over, Jon? Almost sounds like you want to be friends, or something,” Melanie says.

Jon hums placidly. “Oh, I do, I’ve decided. Or I should trust you all, at least.” He sets his glass down on the coaster precisely, his gaze sweeping through the table like a tidal wave of faint pressure. It’s not exactly pleasant, but it doesn’t hurt, either. Everyone stares back at him, just as confused by the unemotional emotional declaration from the most unexpected source as Martin is. “Except for Daisy,” he amends absently. “No offense.”

Daisy snorts. “Pick your battles, Sims.”

“I just did,” he says, then pushes up his glasses and starts unfolding the napkin he’s been fiddling with on the table. Releases Martin’s hand to lay it out flat. He isn’t shaking so badly anymore. “If we are all against Elias, then we’re on the same side. I wanted to - I couldn’t find everything I needed today, and I wanted to have better sources before I said anything, but here,”

Martin stares down at the napkin in confusion. Finds himself blinking at the tabletop instead and has to focus his eyes by force. This leaves him more confused. He’s damn sure he’s been watching Jon with half an eye all night so Martin is absolutely certain that at no point did he take out a marker and draw this odd little picture. Jon is not sneaky.

It’s an eye - of course, what else could it be at this point, really? - but stylized in clean simplicity, and circled with a halo of words.  _ Grant us the sight we cannot see _ , it reads.

“This,” Jon pronounces, “blinds Elias. I didn’t want to risk it in the Institute, but it works on Gerry’s safehouses, and Gerry was a blindspot, too. They created this, or found it somehow, I’m not sure. But it works. Elias is - is very cross with me, since I went invisible to him once I summoned Gerry. This works too, I think,” he raises his hands, strokes over the little lines of eyes on skin, “but I’m uncertain if it’s because of the symbols or something else. I’ve been - I’ve been trying to find Statements that support or debunk this all day, but Gertrude fucked us over, I think.”

Tim coughs out a laugh at that, presses one hand over his eyes. “I’m literally terrified to hear about what you got up to in China,” he says, an honest joke in his voice.

“Oh, I started being able to comprehend all languages there, but that isn’t important. What’s - what is important is that I know when the Unknowing is. I don’t want Elias to know, I don’t think that he should, really, so I wanted to wait until we were out of the Institute and had this,” he pats at the edge of the napkin as Melanie takes several photos of the image. “To say anything about it,”

“Okay,” says Basira decisively, “I think that’s enough for one night. Let’s just… put a pin in that for now. Sober up, Sims, we’ll be needing details.”

“Mm. I’d rather be more drunk, honestly,” Jon says.

“No, how about we end drinks here for the night, okay?” Martin manages. His mind whirrs helplessly under the onslaught of information, given true Jon style - in the most random, unhelpful, pile of too-much-at-once and yet so vague as to be useless. With citations waiting back in his office. But whatever else is happening, he can usually wrangle Jon reliably. And true to form, Jon only nods amicably. Settles back with his hands still in his lap. Leans slowly to rest lightly on Martin’s arm.

Martin supports him.

“Okay,” says Tim, running his hands back through his hair once, making it stick up wildly. He hasn’t been gelling it for weeks. “Okay! You - “ he points at Jon “ - and I are going to talk tomorrow. I’m done for the night - unless you have anything else earth shattering to drop on us?”

Jon blinks at him thoughtfully. “No, I think that’s the most important information. Did you get a copy of -”

“Yes, I got the weird eye memorized. Locked up tight. Goodnight, all,” and with a tired, if long absent, salute, Tim ambles away.

“I’m going to head back to the Institute, see what all you’ve got,” Basira says, shrugging on her coat. Daisy stands silently with her, coat already on. She’s far too quiet.

“Well, I have to go make fun of Georgie for all that. I am going to kick your ass about the ghost thing tomorrow,” Melanie says very quickly, then is up and out of the booth, cane clacking on the wood.

_ Wait, _ Martin thinks dazedly.

“Have a nice night,” Basira says flatly, looking him dead in the eye before abruptly walking away, leaving Martin and Jon alone.

_ Oh, I hate all of you, _ Martin thinks blandly, face burning. The  _ audacity  _ of people who have to be in the Archives with him on a daily basis. As if he won’t be getting back at them for this. The angle of their entwined hands should have been invisible, though Jon’s comfortable lean is very obvious. He’s very warm. Martin shifts his arm on the bench, still uncertain if he should set it anywhere else that it might be welcome.

“Martin, I should be honest with you,” Jon says, sounding deeply contrite. Martin freezes in place. 

“Since we’re - since we talked about - about first meetings… I keep thinking about it, and I have to tell you. I let the dog in,” he confesses in a rush.

“What,” Martin wheezes. 

“I know, I know, I’m sorry,” Jon says, so contrite, one hand resting on Martin’s side in a gentle flutter for a bare second. “But so much was going wrong that day already, and it didn’t get any better so I just never mentioned it - ”

“No? No, Jon, that dog followed me in?” Martin wracks his deeply rattled brain, but the events of that day are crystal clear in his top ten moments of bone deep embarrassment. He was petting it one moment, then it was darting in around his legs the next.

“No, I - I let it in before that. Just once! It was raining and cold, and then I put it back outside when I left, and - and it just kept trying to get in? But I never had the time to try to catch it and get it to a shelter, so. And then it got in that day and you asked about dogs in the Archives and I - I panicked? I’m sorry, Martin. It was me.”

Martin seriously cannot take any more of this. Images of Jon petting a stray dog and panicking about being found out are warring in his head with the photos of him in a red wedding dress kissing Gerard Keay, mixing jarringly with the warm little hand in his, the total, deep attention on him and him alone.

Everybody else has the right of it, probably. Martin mentally closes the many, many new boxes he was handed to sort through today and sets them aside. Tomorrow.

“If you’re angry with me, I understand - ”

“No, honestly? That’s fine, Jon. Thank you for telling me. How about we head out for the evening? You need to go home and drink some water. We can talk tomorrow,” Martin interrupts firmly. There will be words had tomorrow. Martin hopes Jon is actually as up for it as he currently thinks he is.

“Would rather have tea, really,” Jon says like he thinks he’s sly, transferring back to his chair as Martin winds his scarf back on. “...would you like to come over? Not - not now, maybe, but sometime?”

Honestly, if the eldritch contract isn’t a deal breaker, then neither should be being a widower. Martin is nothing if not adaptable. His hand is still warm in his pocket. Jon’s dark eyes are big and hopeful, focused totally on Martin.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I’d love to.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Visit chromaticmelody on tumblr to see their artwork for this chapter! It's Jon's phonescreen so you may experience what Martin did lmao https://chromaticmelody.tumblr.com/post/637154254806712320/my-final-piece-for-tma-big-bang-2020-this-is-for


	3. Tuesday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which a very long week begins.

Jon returns  _ The Catalogue of the Trapped Dead _ to the hunters, hoping the exhausted tremble of his hands will disguise how much he’s shaking. Frankly, he just might be too exhausted and apathetic to be properly afraid right now. That might very well be his normal amount of low blood sugar shakiness. Or low statement shakiness, as he’s beginning to suspect is the real issue.

He’s completely exhausted, what with the whole inhuman-diet revelation accompanying the low-grade statement withdrawal he’s apparently suffering from, the extremely late night, his intense mental preparations to get on yet another cramped bus with his leg aching at a 4/10, his third-or-so kidnapping, watching Max Mustermann regrow his major organs, and also summoning Gerard Keay. It’s been a day. He’s  _ tired _ . He’s taking Julia up on that drink, and then he’s going to go pass out in the airport after using Elias’ card to get a last minute flight home.

So when Trevor flips the book open to check the page, Jon doesn’t even flinch. He just thinks, in a sort of absent minded daze,  _ that seems about right _ .

“L-look,” he starts before either of them can say anything, but then realizes he has absolutely nothing to say for himself. He didn’t exactly plan this. The Hunters both look abominably excited in that sharp flip-of-the-switch manner they’ve been threatening him with all night. They snap their heads up in an identical, single movement, a faint tremor of fine motion spilling from their suddenly coiled muscles.

“Well, well,” Julia croons, a distinctive, wide smile eating up her face. It isn’t a nice expression. Jon recognizes it from Daisy, sees it reflected in Trevor. The older man slams the book shut and drops it on the scuffed ground. They both prowl closer, edging around Jon from opposite angles. Pack hunters in sync.

“Yes, what do you have to say for yourself, Jon?” Julia begins.

“And after we were so nice with you, too,” Trevor adds.

“Look - look, it’s just - it was  _ Gerry _ . I came all this way for them, I could never just - just leave them behind like this!”

“Oh? Knew them, did you?”

“That important to you, to risk your life for the dead?”

“They’re already  _ dead _ .”

“Exactly!” Jon gasps, trying to gather his scattered thoughts into words. “They, they spent their whole life hunting Leitners just to— just to end up being put into one against their will. They just left for America and then— then never came home. I just, I just want them to at least be free of all this horror. I was really h-hoping that they would be…”

Jon stumbles slightly on a root, but keeps his footing. Gets his cane stable on a rock while Julia snickers from behind him. Locks himself into place and keeps still. They’re just trying to rile him up and get him scared. And it’s working. He doesn’t need to give them ground or risk his ankle on the uneven forest floor, too.

He can do this. He’s survived everything he’s been thrown into so far, after all. Somehow.

“What, looking for them alive, then?”

“Yes,” Jon admits weakly. He really had been. It doesn’t feel like a revelation. It’s just true. He clutches the hidden page where it rests between his shirt layers, his heart pounding beneath it.

“Aw. Knew them, did you?”

“Well, I - Gerry, they worked for Gertrude. They left a lot behind, in the archives…”

“Ha. Did they now?” Julia barks out a sharp laugh. It isn’t funny. Jon flounders, turning his head to watch her move around him again. Catches Trevor’s eye. Freezes.

The old vampire killer is watching him closely, but he’s ceased his own slow prowl. Feet planted firmly, facing Jon. Has an oddly thoughtful look on his face, one hand stroking slowly through his thick white beard.

“Left you behind, did our Gerard?” he asks suddenly, the mockery abruptly gone from his tone. Julia pauses on Jon’s other side. It’s very quiet without her pacing steps. Jon swallows hard, panicking, and has little filter left at this point, so he just opens his mouth and hopes it helps.

“N-no, they died. They just— They died. They didn’t mean... they didn’t leave anything behind on purpose. They were supposed to come back with her. But she just… left.”

If Jon had any sympathy left for Gertrude Robinson, it certainly no longer exists after hearing Gerry’s statement.

“Old man,” Julia sighs in a slightly warning sort of tone, all the cruel joy leached from her tone as she crosses over to her hunting partner.

“Now just you wait a minute here, Julia.” says Trevor, frowning at her lightly before turning his burning blue eyes back on Jon. “Jonny here got to ask us lots of questions, think it’s only fair we get to do the same.”

Oh, Lord, Jon is going to die. He’s being handed the excuse to lie his way out and he is going to fumble and die. Jon is not a good liar. Also -

“It’s Jon, thank you.”

“Sure, sure,” says Trevor. “Now… what’s this about knowing Gerard Keay?”

“Trevor, God’s sake,” Julia mutters, looking deeply unimpressed. Trevor waves her off without looking.

“Er,” says Jon. “You… you mentioned how you and Julia just - just clicked when you met each other? I think - it was the same for us.” 

Trevor has a strange look on his face, a twinkling intensity in his blue eyes, hands clasped together in prayer over his mouth. The old man is practically trembling in place. Jon feels not unlike a rabbit warily watching an excited fox prance.

“Julia heard you were asking around about them before we found you, that true? Been looking for a while, then?”

Julia makes a noise like she’s close to saying something, but cuts herself off in frustration. Trevor gleefully ignores her.

“Well, well I mean, yes? They disappeared several years ago and Gertrude never said a word about it on the tapes. I’d always wondered what happened to them. It, it took a long while to follow her trail back here. I was in China before this, trying to see if I could find anything there…”

Julia stares up into the cloudy sky for a long, long moment. “Fine.” she says abruptly and retreats to the treeline, kicking idly at Mustermann’s rehealing body. He appears to have been decapitated at some point.

“Um,” says Jon.

“Don’t you worry about her, now. Go on, summon them again.” says Trevor.

“Um,” says Jon, more urgently.

“Got a couple more questions for good old Gerard there. Wouldn’t want to be missin’ any important info before they go an’ waltz off with you.”

“...Come again?” Jon asks, the whiplash leaving him too bewildered to celebrate the good turn the conversation is taking.

“Go on, go on,” says Trevor, waving his hands in a shooing motion, smiling kindly, his eyes crinkling at the corners. He looks genuinely excited. Jon is not.

But Jon shifts awkwardly and retrieves the page from where it was hidden between his shirt and bra anyway. It’s gone warm from his own body heat. He shudders, then clears his throat to read out Gerry’s lonely last moments. _ It hurts to exist _ . Jon shifts more carefully, eases his weight back on his good leg. Looks guiltily up at Gerry’s misty form as they coalesce into existence with a sigh.

“Jon?” Gerry asks, their voice echoing softly in the open clearing. They only look confused, a bit tired. Run down, but not angry for the sudden summoning.

“I’m sorry,” Jon says quietly. “I, ah, I got caught.”

“Didn’t even last a minute,” says Trevor, amused.

Gerry doesn’t turn, they simply are turned. No transitional movement. Jon can see Trevor faintly through Gerry’s solidifying form.

“Well, shit,” says Gerry.

“Oh, no, no, don’t worry, lad. Just got a couple questions for you, then you’re off. Nothing else to it.”

“... Questions about what.”

“About monsters, old man!” Julia calls over.

“We’ll get there,” says Trevor, clearly ignoring her. “What I want to know is how you two met. Not a lot of free time for romance in these professions, I gather.”

It’s perfectly silent for a beat.

“Oh,” says Jon faintly.

“Huh,” says Gerry.

“Said you both worked for Gertrude? Heard she was a wild one. Only met her once myself, but seems like she was doing quite a lot like what Julia and I are up to now. You both like that, too? Hunting monsters, savin’ the world?”

Jon and Gerry share a brief, but oddly communicative look. They agree -  _ technically yes, thank god for technically no, how did this happen, also what on earth is going on and how do we fix it? Also, Jon, what the fuck did you do?  _ They reach a second agreement just as easily: _ hope you can lie, Jon. _

Jon clears his throat. “Well,” he says carefully, “We both worked for the Magnus Institute, although at that time I was still part of Research,”

Gerry nods. “I was off the books, technically, down in the Archives with Gertrude. Still mostly just tracking down Leitners. I think we met… in the library, right?”

“Yes, it— it must have been that day in the Occult Research section because there was only one book left on the shelves about the Circus…” That is how Jon met Tim, actually. It’s the only thing he can think of. Hopefully Gerry won’t complicate it too much.

Gerry smirks down at Jon, clearly refusing to do so. “And I got it first because you couldn’t reach.”

Jon frowns at him. Tim did that, too. “And it was incredibly rude, too. I was halfway up the ladder!” 

“Well I did warn you, first.”

“What? When?”

“When I put my hand on your back.”

Jon splutters at Gerry’s amused expression. “That’s not— this is not relevant information, thank you, Gerard.”

Jon looks away and fixes his glasses while Gerry sighs theatrically. “See what I have to put up with, Trevor? Never lovely to me.”

“Now that’s not true. I’m explicitly lovely. Anyway, it’s, it’s not an exciting story. We worked at the same place, needed the same book,”

“Got so distracted talking that we never even finished reading it.” Gerry adds.

“Well,” Jon murmurs sadly, because if he keeps going he’s going to put his theatre minor to use and then they will both be dead. Gerry is surprisingly easy to work with, for all that Jon’s never been great at improv. “Finished reading this one together.”

“Yeah, least there’s that,” Gerry agrees, voice sober.

“Well, I’m glad you two found each other,” Trevor says, voice suspiciously thick. Jon blinks away from Gerry, finds the older hunter wiping under one eye. Personally, Jon thinks that there was not a single convincing sentence in that entire exchange.

Jon sighs and turns away to attempt to gather himself a bit and jolts when he notices Julia watching him closely. He clutches Gerry’s page— the rough-supple texture of their stolen skin sending unfortunate tingles of disgust down his arm— and stares back, caught. Jon is not a good liar. The steady scan of her eyes pins him down, threatens to see past the too-thin veneer of their unrehearsed story. 

“Can smell your fear from over here, Archivist. What are you so scared of?”

_ What kind of question is that? _

“What kind of question is that?” Pops out of his mouth unbidden, sharp and sudden. Whatever chatter Trevor had been aiming at Gerry cuts out suddenly.

“Uh,” says Julia, straightening up from her lazy slouch against the car and looking something like concerned. But Jon’s flight-or-beg reflex has been triggered, god help him, and he’s not close to being able to stop it just yet.

“What kind of— first I, I’m, I’m followed by an anatomy student for god knows what reason all over the country, then I get kidnapped by some stranger who— who turns out to be following in her serial killing father’s footsteps and then a dead vampire hunter is there and then someone gets shot and I had to see his liver regrow on the wrong side and then— and then Gerry is dead and being held hostage in, in a horrible human skin Leitner and made to suffer—” And then Jon is stopped. Something stops Jon. This doesn’t happen often. His verbal holes usually go Marianas Trench deep before he can stop, but the sudden appearance of a genuine lump in his throat also does the trick. He started out in a good, cathartic yell, and ended up sounding more upset than he intended. He’s had a very trying day and the ball of lies is rapidly rolling away from him. 

He would very much like to sit down, but this empty roadside cabin lacks any amenities. Jon shifts his grip on his cane and tries to ease his weight onto his better leg.

“Okay,” says Julia slowly, both hands up and standing well away from Jon, looking like she wants to bolt as much as he does in the ringing silence. Something cold washes over his arm.

“God’s sake, back off about it already.” Gerry stands in front of Jon, just transparent enough to see the edges of the trees through them. Their dark eyes are a little wide, brows raised. This close, Jon can see where the dark makeup thickening and straightening their brows is a little flaked. They look a bit impressed, if Jon is reviewing his own accidental performance correctly.

A hand he can’t quite feel is rubbing lightly at his tense arm, as if to soothe him. Hopefully Jon hasn’t gone and cocked it all up for them.

“I’m sorry,” Jon says honestly.

“Eh, it’s alright,” says Gerry, lightly pseudo-patting Jon once more before stepping away, turning to frown at the hunters, who are clustered together in a huddle at the treeline, looking distinctly guilty and uncomfortable. Jon shoots Gerry an unimpressed look. There is nothing even remotely ‘alright’ about this situation. Gerry makes a face back acknowledging that, which Jon appreciates

“Sorry about all that,” says Trevor in a careful tone, which just makes Jon feel worse because now the insane vampire hunter is being nice to him. Lord, he hates normal social interaction. This is the most uncomfortable pseudo-conversation he’s ever been part of. And it just keeps happening. Is currently happening.

“Look,” Gerry says firmly, “I just don’t want to be trapped anymore. I want to  _ move on _ . Just let Jon burn my damn page and we can all go. I’m done, alright?”

Julia stares through them. Gerry stands— floats— tall and firm. Eventually, she sighs.

“Not going to be any use to us anymore, are you?” she asks.

“Not at all,” they agree with something like a faint chuckle.

“That’s a bit abrupt is all,” Trevor blurts out. Oh, lord, is it? Jon has no frame of reference for ghost summoning etiquette.

“So, this has all been grand,” says Julia loudly, clapping her hands together once briskly and remaining as physically far away from Jon and Gerry as she can. Her hands find her jacket pockets next, crammed in awkwardly as she continues, eyes on the far trees, “We’ll just be over here while you do the deed and - “

“Julia,” Trevor hisses at her, in the tone of a scolding grandparent shushing a rude child far too loudly. “I think we ought to offer an apology. Don’t you see them?”

“Er,” says Julia, obviously doing her best not to see anything at all. Trevor marches over and takes her elbow, tugging her back towards Mustermann’s prone form, whispers something fiercely in her ear, which she has to bend down significantly to acquiesce to. She sighs deeply. “Old man, I swear.”

Trevor gives her a look. She gives one back. Somehow, Trevor wins, and she starts dragging the Stranger avatar, now in one piece, towards the car.

“Now then,” Trevor says brightly, “I’d feel bad forcing you two out on your own after all that.” As if he wasn’t half the cause of ‘all that’. “And, not gonna lie, been a bit boring around here lately. Got our monster, yes, but this? Not every day a man gets to see the ending of a soap opera. How about a deal— I can see your rings, so why don’t Julia and I—” Julia yells “Leave me out of this!” from the truckbed which Trevor completely ignores, “ —act as bodyguards for you against these Stranger creatures out for your hide, so’s you two can finish getting hitched before Gerry goes off. Good huntin’, nobody dies. ‘Cept Gerard, of course.”

Jon and Gerry stare at each other in shared disbelief. There are a multitude of bulky silver rings spread across Gerry’s knuckles, all of which look like they could do a good deal of damage and not at all like engagement rings. And of course Trevor Herbert wouldn’t recognize an ace ring. Which is, well... Some sort of convoluted convenience, since it appears to have won them total freedom.

At the cost of marriage.

“If we’re actually going to talk about this, I would like to at least sit down first,” Jon interrupts before any more nonsense can further derail his already thoroughly derailed escape attempt. His pain is rapidly approaching a solid 6/10 from the stress, and if he doesn’t get to sit in the next minute or two, he might just collapse. He’d most like to get his prosthetic off and fix the ache under his liner, but that’s not something he really wants to do in front of the hunters. Well, actually, he’d  _ most  _ like to not be in this situation, but something about begging for your life and not being able to choose suppercedes that.

But Trevor only nods amicably, and then Jon is seating himself with a groan in the backseat of their car. Sidesaddle with the door open, of course. While he might not have high hopes for protesting against going to a secondary—or tertiary— location, he’s not going to be  _ too  _ cooperative. He’s never been in a truck like this— with the thick tires high and the two backseats an uncomfortable afterthought in construction of the vehicle. If he’s being forced to endure this truck for any longer than it takes to be kidnapped, he will be sitting in the front passenger seat. No exceptions. He will fight Julia Montauk on that.

He automatically opens his mouth to offer Gerry a seat, and shuts it slowly as the ghost simply tucks their legs up and sits in thin air, crosslegged and leaning easily. Their signature long, black coat hangs straight down beneath them, shifting slowly in an unfelt wind.

“Huh,” says Jon.

“Gotta admit there are some perks to this whole ghost business,” Gerry grins. “But if we could hurry up?”

“Yes, yes, of course. Sorry, is it easier to be, er, in your page? If it helps you to be unsummoned for a time, I don’t mind waiting.”

“Nah, don’t think it does. Same feeling no matter what. This way I’ve got a bit more.... I dunno, agency or something. Quieter, in the page. Rather be out here right now, so I can speak for myself.”

_ It hurts to exist. _ Jon understands that intimately.

“Alright. So. Marriage. Thoughts?” Jon manages.

There’s a few seconds of night-time silence. Gerry laughs first. 

“Oh, fuck, okay. Sure, why not? Be a good last spit on my mum’s grave, at least.”

“Unsupportive, was she?” Trevor asks wisely from his own seat up front. 

“You don’t know the half of it, Hunter. Homophobe, transphobe, racist, eugenicist, you name it.”

“Ugh. Glad she isn’t in the picture anymore.” Jon says and then immediately blanches. But Gerry only nods, straightening up in their static lounge. 

“Good to be free of her, yeah. Good to be free of everything, I think. So, are we going to the courthouse or what?”

Jon imagines driving up to the local municipal building for a ghostly elopement with the reanimating corpse of a Stranger cop in the truck bed and has to spare a moment of incredulity for how his life is going. At least this probably won’t get him killed? He can be an optimist when it suits him.

“Well, that’s awfully sudden, innit? Should let you two talk things out, since Gerard is dead and all. Supposed to go to Vegas during these occasions, anyway. Right Julia?” Trevor inserts.

Julia, who has been leaning forward in the drivers’ seat with her head facedown on the wheel, only grunts. “I think…” she says, slowly lifting her head, her spine neatening into something sturdy, her eyes taking on that faint edge of otherworldly delight that Jon is now unfortunately familiar with. Her hands flex around the wheel. “The longer this takes, the more Strangers are going to pop up, likely. I’ll take it.” 

She smiles. Trevor smiles. They both make a noise that isn’t quite a noise itself, but the feeling of panting hounds and rushing blood. Something thumps in the trunk.

“S-sounds fine to me,” Jon says weakly, looking up at Gerry hopelessly. They only roll their dark eyes, leaning one elbow on their knee. Their tattoos line up neatly, unblinking. A picture of utter boredom with the Hunter’s antics.

“Sure,” they say with a shrug, “How long could it take?”


	4. Wednesday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which a few things are discussed.

It will take 32 hours, actually.

“Ah,” says Jon, who has just experienced a twelve hour bus trip from one busy city to another and genuinely does not comprehend the scale of America, but knows a portent of ongoing discomfort when he hears one.

“Plenty of time to draw some more ghouls out of the works, eh Julia?” Trevor asks, somehow delighted by the distance.

“Considering what we got in less than an hour? You bet it will be,” she purrs back. They both thrum with a carnage-delight that Jon is not about to argue with. Roadtrip it is.

“S-so, how many days will that be?” he asks.

“Hm. Could be two,” Julia hazards with a shrug. “Don’t need to stop unless we have to, really.”

“Could drag it out some,” Trevor suggests. “Let whatever beasties are coming this way catch up.”

Julia nods slowly, meticulously folding up the map the Hunters have been staring down at like it leads to treasure for the last few minutes. Jon continues compulsively pulling attraction brochures out of the large wooden case until he has one of each, then stuffs them all in his bag. Finds a tape recorder hidden behind the last one in the corner slot. Drops it in, too.

They are stopped at a way station on the edge of some highway, and Gerry had accompanied Jon as he dumped a few articles of clothing from the traveler’s convenience store into a basket, alongside all the ridiculously expensive medical equipment he had to repurchase. All of his are, much like the rest of his non-immediate luggage, still on a Greyhound on the way to DC. Including his phone. Good thing Elias gave him a company card for the trip.

Trevor and Julia disappear into their rented showers, which Jon is fascinated by, grateful for, and never going to touch with a ten foot pole. They wait for the hunters in a small cafe area. The table, walls, ceiling, and tiled floors are all a tasteless, professional beige. Jon grimaces his way through the worst cup of tea he’s had outside of Georgie’s kitchen. The caffeine does not perk him up, as usual. Gerry watches the mounted televisions cycling through American news stations in fascination.

“Huh,” they say eventually, “Almost makes me glad I shuffled off when I did.”

“Hm. I might well have to envy you.” Jon replies mildly. Gerry snorts.

The dark outside the massive windows is quiet around the dull roar of the occasional truck engine. Inside, the low bell that signals various order completions, and the faint, overlapping drone of multiple televisions fall into white noise. There’s a neat finality to the ponderous take-off of each driver at their almost-identical commercial trucks, heading to an almost-identical stop-off somewhere else. Sometimes they turn left. Sometimes they turn right. Jon does not know what to say to Gerry. 

“This is absurd,” Jon says to Gerry. Gerry hums thoughtfully, turning their attention from one screen to another. The artificial lighting solidifies them, somehow. Not physically, but they don’t look half as wispy as they did under the moonlight. The fluorescence doesn’t quite capture the unearthliness of their spectral form as easily. They cast no reflection in the glass.

Jon is distracted by the implications of modern lighting on the effects of spirit viewing. Is it like the issue with digital capture that’s been considered the norm for decades? The faintest outline of the chair shows through them, and something about their color is off, but if he were simply passing through and only glanced over briefly, nothing would seem amiss, save for the sheer oddity of the contrast between the two not-quite-humans sitting at the too-tall table together.

Jon opens his mouth. Shuts it. Drinks his tea.

Gerry sighs deeply, runs their hands down their face, then back up into their hair. Tugs it into disarray and then shakes it back into order. Crosses their arms on the table - no, a hair or so above it - with a decisive frown.

“Not gonna make a break for it? Run off into the American sunset?” they ask.

Jon snorts, sets his horrible tea aside firmly, says, “I wouldn’t get very far. Not much one for running,” then pauses. Waits.

But Gerry only nods, a vague sort of half-shrug settling across their shoulders in a nonverbal  _ what can you do _ . No vapid encouragement or guilty grimace over the thoughtless question. Julia had shifted awkwardly in her boots and clearly not known how to rescue herself when Jon had flatly told her  _ no  _ and plucked up his cane despite her instructions not to reach for it. In her defense, the angle of the table had prevented her from seeing what it was until that moment. Jon’s had a lot of awkward staredowns recently, but Julia’s eventual nod and jump right back into the kidnapping had actually not been that bad. Good sportsmanship on her part. Occasionally Jon can win.

Or. Well. Inasmuch as Jon can win with the entire known and unknown universe against him. Certainly, he  _ could  _ walk right out of this generic building and attempt to hitch a ride with a generic trucker, but with Jon’s luck? Considering how he picked up three tails across several states, he’s not truly willing to tempt fate any more than he already is. Trevor and Julia may be Hunters who could turn on him at any moment, but for now he’s secured their allegiances as bodyguards.  _ Very  _ enthusiastic bodyguards. That’s more than he has in the Archives, even.

“Same,” Gerry drawls. “I’m stuck to the page, I think. I’ve tried to walk off before, but the pain gets worse with distance.”

“You… you said it hurts to exist. Is it— during our first conversation, when I summoned you, you were worried about the timing. I figured you meant before Trevor and Julia became impatient, but I keep thinking about it— is that what you meant? Does it get worse the longer you’re, ah, present?”

“Nah. It’s just this constant fucking soul-agony, you know?” Gerry says, voice calm but low and intense. Jon winces sympathetically.

“I—I’m sorry. I truly didn’t mean for you to be dragged into anything more. This situation is— ah. It’s, uh…”

“Can’t wrap my mind around it, either, honestly.” Gerry sinks down in the chair, or maybe through it, and leans their head on the back of it. They have to sink significantly to do so. Jon’s foot goes cold as Gerry’s leg passes through. He tucks both his legs up on the rung of the chair without comment. “But that’s just me. How’re you doing, fiance?”

Jon groans at the slight, teasing lilt the last word gets. 

“Alright there, darling? Dearest? Love of my life? Love of my death, actually,” Gerry cajoles as Jon puts his head in his hands. Then their brief amusement dies down. “Really, I mean. You picked up a lot of stuff for pain. And I’m not blind.” They nod over to the new crutches Jon procured, folded away on the high windowsill. If he has to be up and about this much, he’ll be needing them. Gerry doesn’t know about the TENS unit Jon affixed to his hip in the bathroom. It’s alright. It works. If he’d known travel was going to bother him— or, indeed, had any real concept of just how much travel he would have to deal with— Jon would have just brought his EMS unit. He did not. Jon did not plan many things that he should have about this trip. Elias simply had not given him the time to do so. Likely on purpose.

Jon sighs. “A long as we continue to be able to stop and stretch, I’ll be fine. It fluctuates. Not, ah, constant flesh-agony, as it were. Thank you for the concern, love.” he adds after a beat.

Gerry nods acceptance. “Really glad I can't feel my own flesh-agony anymore. Guess we’re both shit out of luck, huh? Sweetie,” they tack on. Jon drags his stare away from the television over Gerry’s shoulder. Meets their eyes. 

They both laugh; belatedly and quiet and a bit helpless, but they do laugh.

“ _ The Magnus Institute Library? _ We could have met from across the pyre at a Leitner burning! Gerry!”

“ _ Read a book together? _ Seriously? It was a first date, not our fortieth anniversary, Jon.”

“I was just trying to keep it simple! And it was thematic,”

“Oh good, glad you got some narrative satisfaction out of it. We’re tragically parted lovers, Jon! Mocking my death like that, really?”

“Oh, is it disrespectful of the dead if I don’t follow your lead, then?”

“Deeply. You need to be more considerate of your spouse’s wishes, Jon.”

Jon shakes his head slowly, smiling with surprising ease.

“Are you actually alright with this?” Jon asks into the early-morning quiet that settles between them.

“Fuck, I think so? Hell of a send off, you know. You’re the one who’s going to be dealing with it all later, anyway. You alright with marrying a random ghost you picked up on the highway?”

Jon’s been both thinking about it and not thinking about it at all.

“You’re not a random ghost. You’re Gerard Keay.” Gerry’s eyebrows raise slowly and Jon winces, catching himself at being odd. He resettles more firmly on the uncomfortable bar stool. Folds his hands in his lap.

“I just mean that I’ve - I’ve read about you. In the statements. There’s been quite a number of people who you’ve saved who have come to talk about it, afterwards. You… you’re a good person, I think. So, frankly, if I am to be married to a ghost, then I’m glad it is to one whose living actions I can fully support.” 

Gerry drops their legs through the chair and sits up slowly, meeting Jon’s eyes. Lets out a breath as they look away abruptly. Jon must sound like a star-struck idiot. 

Jon clears his throat awkwardly. “Not to mention the inherent good deed of Leitner burning.”

Gerry’s mouth twitches up at that. In the angles of the bright lighting, Jon can clearly see that their lipstick is a deep plum, not black. Edges crisp and sharp with liner. They had died in hospital. This image of them must be how they see themself. Gerry’s very soul having chipped black nail polish is charming, somehow.

A thin smile blooms slow and self-depreciating over their face. For all the sadness of it, it makes their dark eyes sparkle, tucks dimples into their thin cheeks.

“Think I’m a good person?”

Jon barely manages to bite his tongue on the knee-jerk projection. Subjectively, yes, he does.

“Do you not?” he asks just as quietly instead.

“Honestly? Not really. Felt like I did it all for myself. Burning Leitners was about destroying them, destroying mum’s work. It was about - I dunno, getting even with the people who used them?”

Jon considers this. “What about Andrea Nunis?”

Gerry looks at him blankly.

“A woman who met you in Italy. She was sliding into the Lonely, and you advised her on how to anchor herself. She did survive, by the way. Because of you. No Leitners or vengeance involved.”

“Oh,” Gerry says quietly, unwinding in the chair like they’ve lost steam. “Good.” Then they add, somewhat amused again, “You just remembered that?”

It’s Jon’s turn to smile like he doesn’t mean it. “I am the Archivist; I remember all the Statements.”

“Damn. And here I thought I was special.”

“Well, I mean, you— “

“Oh, there you two are! Now, you know I hate to interrupt, but we’ll be heading out soon as Julia’s out, but she might be awhile. Child of luxury, that one. I’ll be off at the shop over here for a few things, so take your time! Enjoy yourselves!”

And with that, Trevor is off again. The old man cleans up nice, for all that he could use some neater clothing. His mostly white hair hangs in neatened ringlet curls, and paired with his full beard and bright blue eyes, he looks all for the world like an off-season Santa Clause. All he’s missing is the height.

Jon and Gerry both let out a breath as he ambles deeper into the centre.

“Er. Any other falsehods we need to construct, while we have the privacy for it?” Jon asks.

“Hm, probably. How about— “

Eventually, they recoveine at the truck. Trevor disappears under the hood of the bed with some freshly purchased bungee cords. Jon does his best not to pay attention to the noises.

“Right, here’s how this is going to work,” Julia says with a clap, then tucks her hands away in the pockets of her leather jacket. Gerry stands opposite her in the same position. Jon feels distinctly leather-jacket-less in his local American University hoodie. “We’re going to take three days. Trevor and I’ll trade off driving, so just sleep in the car or read your antique roadshow packets or whatever. When something tails us, we’ll deal with it, and you two can go on a date or something, I don’t care.”

“Sounds.... Efficient.” Jon offers.

“Thanks,” Julia drawls.

“Is that alright with you, Gerry?” Jon asks.

“Yeah, sounds peachy to me. We going, then?”

“Soon as Trevor’s done.”

“Lovely.” Jon says. “I’m going to sleep, if we’re taking off without a stop-off at a hotel anywhere?”

Julia barks out a laugh. “Honestly, maybe two of us together can convince the old man to go for it. Last time I wanted a room, he slept in the damn car. Says it builds character.”

“It absolutely does,” Trevor trills, climbing out of the now silent back. “Though,” he adds thoughtfully, looking Jon up and down and landing on his leg, “Guess it wouldn’t do you any favors.”

Jon stiffens, but the older Hunter only opens the backdoor and hops in, no further commentary offered or questions imposed. Julia pushes off the truck and heads for the driver’s seat, which still gives Jon a moment of confusion until he remembers what country he’s in.

“Gerry?” he asks, before opening his own door, “Do you want to stay out of the page for the trip? I could always summon you again, when we stop, if you’d like that?”

Gerry lets out a breath. It curls like smoke, but dissipates much quicker. “Nah, rather stay out here, I think. See the sights, you know? Roadtrip, and all. Used to traveling, but America’s entertaining enough.”

Jon just looks at them for a moment. There’s nothing he can do to ease Gerry’s suffering in this moment, and they have made their choice.

“Alright,” Jon says, “But if you ever need anything, just let me know. I’ll… well, I’ll probably be asleep here in a moment, so we can talk later?”

“Sounds fine. I’ve got Trevor to keep me company,” they say with a faint smirk. “Watch this,” And then they climb directly into the car, phasing through the door. Trevor squawks from inside. Jon chuckles. Climbs in.

He’s exhausted, so after opening up a new, slightly plastic-scented compression glove for his burnt hand and removing his liner and sock as discreetly as he can under his sweatpants, he passes out instantly.

And then wakes up to an early morning diffusion of light over a parking lot far too soon. It is mostly empty, save for a few hardy weeds in the cracks, and shimmering like it rained recently.

“Jon?” Gerry’s voice floats into his awareness. Oh, right.

Julia and Trevor are not around, but Gerry’s lounging in the driver’s seat, long legs crossed up over the dashboard, boots phased through the window. God, looking at that does something to Jon’s head.

“Did something actually find us already?” he asks, covering his mouth when a wide yawn overtakes his words.

“Nah, Julia says we’re staying for a few hour break to let anything evil play catch-up. Crossed a state line or two, I think. Keycard’s here,” they nod to a flimsy white swipe card in the cupholder. Jon plucks it up once his leg is back in place. He feels less vulnerable donning it where Gerry can see than the Hunters.

“Wonderful. Er, ready to head in, then?”

“Sure. The Stranger’s with them, by the way. Think they’re keeping it in the bathtub?”

“Well. I’d rather not think about that, to be honest.”

“Fair enough.”

The little room that Jon opens the heavy, creaking door to is sparse and smells faintly of cigarettes. He hasn’t smoked in a while. Doesn’t have the craving for it enough to justify it at the moment. There’s a painfully generic painting of cows in a field over the bed. Ugly lamp.

“Oh, no.” Gerry says in a low sarcastic drawl, “There’s only one bed, Jon. Looks like ole’ Trevor’s up to his matchmaking ways once again. Whatever shall we do.”

Jon snorts and settles on the bed, folding his crutches at the foot of it. Stretches out his spine. He’s never getting on another bus or in another car for the rest of his life after this debacle. “Well, I’ll take this side, if you don’t mind. Although I must say, it is rather inappropriate to be alone together before the wedding.”

“Absolute impropriety.” Gerry agrees with an affected accent, then hesitates. “So… if I’m the bridegroom, what are you?”

Jon blinks.  _ Bridegroom  _ is the quaintest thing he’s heard come out of Gerry’s mouth yet. And it fits them. The page had used they/them pronouns for Gerry, but in the context of nuptial terminology, Jon hadn’t thought about what to call them.

Or what to call himself. He’s considered marriage and settling down as concepts, certainly, but Jon’s never been one for elaborate fantasies. Had been too young to really think about such with Georgie, which in retrospect is probably a good thing. 

But a partner? Yes. That’s something Jon has always wanted. He’s just - well. He’s not exactly the most outgoing person, or the most personable, and adding in his dislike of short relationships and an ongoing string of horrible first impressions had left him unattractive as a dating partner. Well. They’ve skipped all of that nonsense, at the least.

“I wouldn’t mind being the bride. Or the widow, as it were.” Jon’s thoughts on gender are complex, though they are not many. Shan’t elaborate.

Gerry hisses a faux-pained noise of agreement. “Planning on offing me already, Jon?”

“Hm. Never thought I’d be the black widow type, but it’s astounding, the depths we can find ourselves falling to,”

“In America.” Gerry adds.

“In America,” Jon agrees. “Well, if we’re going to be stuck here for awhile, I would like to shower first. If you don’t mind?”

Gerry waves him off. “Go ahead. I might wander around a bit.”

Jon uses all the hot water in the tank and prays that the bottom of the tub isn’t too filthy. Once he’s had enough of that, he sets his new, ill-fitting, Pennsylvania-chic clothes to rights and lies back on the bed. Gerry’s run off somewhere. 

Left to his own devices, Jon stares a hole into the off-white ceiling, mind buzzing with both the emotional and stressful overload of the last few days combined with the numbing boredom of time spent in transit. It’s not as bad as the circus, at least. Jon tries very hard to never think about the circus.

“Hey,” says Gerry suddenly. Jon jolts, unsure if he’d been dozing or not. Gerry snickers a bit. When Jon shuffles to the headboard to sit up for something approaching a normal conversational position, he finds Gerry looking him over contemplatively.

“Oh,” Jons says belatedly, bringing one hand halfway to his face before realizing how useless the gesture must be. He only chose to wear makeup on the trip in the hopes that covering his scars would render him a less easily recognizable figure. It’s not exactly out of shame for his scars that he chooses to hide them on occasion. It’s just exhausting to have to deal with random people asking him personal questions. The irony is not lost on him. “Lost my makeup kit in transit.”

“Hm. Think I did as well, actually. Corruption get you, then?”

“Yes, actually. Had a bit of a run-in with Jane Prentiss— she was, uh, a flesh hive of worms. Invaded the Archives. This is all from when she was defeated, mostly. Her corpse fell right on top of me, and, well, worms.”

He’d been half out of his body on CO2 at the time, but the weightless collapse of what had once been Jane Prentiss in a papery, dry heap had left a distinct impression on Jon. Her hair had been stiffened in long, wide sheets, and set into place as organically as a real wasps nest, under all the grime and worm fluids. He’s seen a lot of grotequesery since, but that was still a special kind of disgusting.

“Worms with teeth?” Gerry asks.

“They sort of just burrowed, actually. Might have preferred teeth, come to think of it,”

“Corruption's nasty. Guess I got off lucky, never getting into it with any of them. All mine end here,” They tug the high turtleneck of their shirt down, bearing a perfect line of reddened burn scarring around their throat. It isn’t as deep as Jon’s burn, but significantly more widespread. The skin a few centimeters around each stylized eye on their knuckles is unscarred.

“Are your tattoos some sort of - of talisman or ward against the powers, then?” Jon asks, fascinated, as Gerry joins him on the bed. The mattress does not dip with their weight. 

“I dunno,” Gerry says brightly, flashing a roguish grin. Jon groans at them.

“Are you—” Jon cuts off for a moment before giving up and barrelling on anyway. “Are you in pain— I mean, I know that you are, you said. But there’s no way to help you other than… well, I have your page and my lighter. I could free you right now, if you wanted.”

Gerry takes in a breath, uncurling from their slouch. Leans back on their hands. Wisps of mist curl when they exhale. “And what would the nutjob Hunters keeping you hostage think of that?”

“Could always tell some sob story about how we talked, and didn’t want you to be in pain anymore. Probably get away with it,” Jon hazards, not believing a word of it. 

“Hm. Well, got any way to fight them off?” Gerry asks.

“Um, no. My abilities don’t really have any sort of… offensive use…” Jon says, wincing.

“I meant, like, a knife.”

“Why would I have a knife?”

Gerry rests a hand on their cheek, then covers their mouth for a moment, decidedly not saying anything. Jon waits, knowing when he’s being judged. He wasn’t about to attempt to smuggle a knife onto a plane, let alone the sad little pocket knife he tried to keep on him in the Archives. Not that it had ever done him any good. 

They sit quietly together for a time. Jon’s mind races, but he really doesn’t have much practical use outside the Archives, unless he wants both hunters enraged with him for asking painful, invasive questions. But it hurts to exist and there is only one cure for it available to Gerry, tragic as it is.

“It’s just, well. I understand, I suppose, and I don’t— I just don’t get why you’re still here. You could easily walk off somewhere or return to your page and not be bothered by all this. I mean, you are a book. Whatever my fate will be is hardly relevant to yours.”

“Yeah, well. Had a change of heart.”

“What, on your walk? The hotel pool that evocative?”

“Nah,” Gerry drawls, dark eyes on Jon, “My end’s in sight, you know? Don’t really want anyone else to go out with me.”

Jon has nothing to say to that. Tips his head back, watches the shadows from the pool outside the window shatter across the far wall. 

“...what about you? How are you holding up?” Gerry asks. “I mean, you’re the one who’s still all flesh-y, here.”

“Think I’m Beholding, actually.”

Gerry groans at him, rolls their head expressively on their neck.

“But honestly? I’m fine. Not doing too badly, today. Mind if I take a walk? You can come if you wish; I’d like a cigarette and to stretch my legs a bit more.” Staying in a smoking room probably wouldn’t have been Jon’s first choice, but he wasn’t exactly consulted on the matter. He’d rather take his poison outside, with a side of fresh air, than hotbox a dingy hotel room. The smell of smoke is rare enough these days that it must have triggered a craving on sheer elusiveness. More likely, it’s stress.

Gerry shrugs and then is gone. Jon blinks at the space where they should have been helplessly for a moment, his poor living brain grinding gears on the sudden evidence of the supernatural. He slides off the bed and snags his crutches, finds Gerry leaning on the wall nearest the door like they had walked there normally. 

The hallways are simultaneously overbright and dim, the artwork on the walls and the patterns of the carpet and wallpaper inoffensively offensive to the eye. It smells like the pool, old air conditioning, carpet cleaner, and cigarettes. Jon tries not to think of Helen. 

The plants in America are very large: Jon’s never seen a holly bush this tree-like. Or this untrimmed. But it boasts the only bench they can find, for all that it overlooks the massive, mostly empty parking lot.

Gerry watches Jon light up while Jon considers his priorities. Left his phone on the bus but ensured his half-gone pack and lighter were in his pocket. What sort of idiocy is that?

“Does it bother you?” he asks.

Gerry shrugs. “Can’t even smell it. Wouldn’t have come if I minded.”

Jon just nods. “Suppose we should, ah, discuss the ceremony, then?”

Gerry snorts, joins him on the bench. Spreads an arm over the back that would nearly touch Jon’s shoulder, if they were closer. If they were alive. The cold of them radiates faintly through the heat of the sun. 

“Wedding, innit.” Gerry shrugs. Jon coughs a little, surprised by the laugh that drags out of him.

“True enough. I was meaning to ask if there were any traditions or - or practices you would want honored? Or dishonored, as it were,”

“Hm. Long as it’s not at a fear church or something, not really? Mum didn’t put a lot of stock in religion. Like, normal ones, I mean. Did sort of flirt with converting to an orthodox one when I was a teen, just to piss her off. She pretended she didn’t care since it wasn’t  _ real _ , but the look on her face when I told her that it shouldn’t bother her any if I upheld fake traditions and didn’t work on the sabbath made it all worth it,” Gerry says with a firm, smug sort of nostalgia. Jon is fascinated. 

“I wouldn’t mind a more traditional ceremony. All the same to me, really. I was thinking that I ought to make my grandmother happy. It might be too depressing to have henna done on my own, though,” Jon muses.

“That’s the hand designs, right? Temporary tats?”

“Essentially. It’s more of a group tradition than something done in isolation, but we aren’t exactly following protocol to start with.”

“Important to you?” Gerry asks.

Important? Jon has been to more funerals than weddings. His grandmother made certain he grew up fiercely connected to her culture, so he knows, conceptually, what should be done. None of those things involve ghosts, sudden elopements, Hunters, fear gods that are not gods but more like hateful colors, or whatever Jon’s gender is doing these days. Maybe it would be nice, to uphold an established wedding ritual in defiance of— well, the rest of Jon’s absurdist life. Syrian weddings have changed quite a bit since his grandmother emigrated, anyway.

“Yes. I think so. Suppose an appointment can wait until we arrive. What about the surname, then? It doesn’t have to change for either of us, these days, and I suppose ‘Gerard Keay’ has quite the reputation to it—”

“Gerard Sims, actually. Fuck mum’s legacy.” Gerry interrupts gleefully.

Jon blinks, surprised but not blindsided. “Well, you’re in good company. The Sims name has plenty of ghosts attached to it. If that’s what you want, then I see no issue with it.”

“Good. Thanks, I… I just don’t want her getting the last word, you know? I shouldn’t care. I really shouldn't. She’s dead. What’s the point of it, except, I dunno, performative bullshit? She’ll never know nothing she ever worked towards came to fruition like she blindly thought it all would. Nothing to reap for all her sowing. No one’s here to get revenge on. But still, I don’t want her name anymore. I don’t want to be Gerard Keay. That guy was fake as hell. I’ll be Gerry Sims— well, you know, for like half an hour before I die,”

Jon’s brain gives him  _ Gerry Sims Gerry Sims Gerry Sims _ instead of anything useful. He takes a drag instead.

“Well, I mean, you are dead, too. No point to doing any of this, really. However you want it done is worth it, I think. It can be against your mother and for my late grandmother… and my parents, I guess, at the same time.”

“Yeah, I guess. Both your parents dead, then? Like, a proper orphan?” Gerry asks, then blinks at themself and looks apologetically at Jon, “Sorry, it’s not a big deal to me, but it’s probably rude to ask, huh?”

“Probably,” Jon agrees with a shrug. “I don’t remember them, so I’ve never minded. My grandmother took me in right away, so it’s not like I missed having family around. Do you not count yourself as an orphan?”

“I dunno. I thought it only counted if it happened when you were a kid. My dad’s been dead since I ever knew. Mum probably killed him, I think. But she didn’t, like, actually properly fuck off the mortal coil until I was in my twenties, about. Not sure which death should even count, for her. Or me. Hm. But, yeah, never really felt like I had parents at all. What’s a grandma like? Didn’t get any of those, either.”

“Oh, well. Since she raised me, it was a little odd. They are supposed to be relatives you don’t see too frequently, I believe. They spoil their grandchildren from a distance, especially on holidays. For me, she was all I had. And I was the only living family member left in England, too. We were alone together. She was a proud woman, and she did her best by me, but she was elderly and grieving and tired. Lived to be in her eighties before passing.”

“I can’t imagine living that long,” Gerry says thoughtfully. “She sounds nice.”

“Oh, she was a right bastard, actually. Where do you think I got it from?” Jon says brightly. He loved his grandmother fiercely. She did not get on with most people. Jon learned his perfect posture and his best haughty stare at her side. Learned how to frown loudly enough to shame others into silence from behind her abaya. He misses her, but the grief is old and familiar and too integral to ever really remove. He doesn’t remember his parents, so he never learned to miss them, for all that their deaths shaped his life. The concept of feeling relief mixed in with that sort of grief is odd and hard to parse, but then again: Jurgen Leitner.

Jon’s seen the corpses of all of his grandmother’s eldery friends at their funerals, but only ever the actual bloody scene of death thrice. The old librarian deserved an ignominious death for his hubris, but not at the hands of the worse evil that is Elias Bouchard. Still, Jon is either relieved to have a solid, neat ending to the tale of Jurgen Leitner, or indifferent to it. The amount of gore might have left him a tad traumatized, however.

Jon has mixed feelings on the death of Mike Crew, but none of them are relief. His first corpse doesn’t bear thinking about.

Gerry snorts out a breath that is not laughter. “Begging forgiveness for the comparison, but that reminds me of Gertrude. Same sort of… tough old lady with a kid situation, looks like,”

Gertrude. Jon has never known how to feel about Gertrude, Archivist or posthumous. But the comparison is apt. 

“Aside from all of the murder,” Jon agrees.

“Yeah. ‘S weird to think about. And now she’s gone and got murdered herself. Circle of life, or whatever,”

Jon tries not to laugh at that.

“Think she’d, like, come to the wedding and sit in the back row?” Gerry asks.

Jon does laugh at that, just a little. Gertrude Robinson, dressed up neatly for a wedding reception, wishing them many happy years.

Jon, suddenly and acutely, wishes his grandmother could do the same. It’s a nonsensical wish - even if he could explain this ridiculous situation to her, there would be no way she would stand for Jon marrying a soon to be even more deceased ghost. 

“She could sit beside my grandmother. They would either get on perfectly or hate one another instantly.” Jon says finally. They lapse back into silence.

Actually, Inaam would have hated Gertrude. As someone who had lost her entire family, and was fiercely protective of all that she left, the dismissive and pragmatic Gertrude would have been like oil and water to her. Jon could describe her with much the same terms, but they appear on the other end of the spectrum of protection and caring for others. Gertrude was all about the bigger picture and greater fate and so lost sight of the trees for the forest, but Inaam’s name had been firmly carved into the heartwood of each tree she cared about. An odd balance. He’s almost glad they never met. Honestly, it’s a bit odd to think about how much of Jon’s life has been spent in the shadow of strong-willed elderly women, surrounded by death and loss and trauma.

“You know, I never actually met Gertrude. Properly, I mean. Shared a smoke break with her once, incidentally. I was left with the impression that she was less than impressed with me.” Jon says thoughtfully.

“Yeah, she had a talent for doing that. She was intimidating if you didn’t know her, and downright scary when you did. Trusted her anyway,” Gerry chuckles, mirthless and quiet. “Look where that got me.”

“I really don’t understand it, either. Why would she bind you like this and then just… leave? There has to have been a point to it, hasn’t there? I keep trying to think of something, but there’s just… nothing.”

“I don’t think I want there to be a point to it. If there was, I wouldn’t do it. Just for her.”

Jon finishes his cigarette quietly. Thinks about Julia saying  _ yeah, they do that _ , even when they were being held hostage and only had their tormentors to lose. About a lonely woman in Italy. About a badly burned teenager, exhausted and afraid, still doing their best to protect others from the forces of evil.

If there is a reason for Gertrude to have done this to Gerry, Jon doesn’t want them to ever find out. They each sit quietly in their grief. Jon lights another cigarette. He’s not usually a chain smoker, but it feels right. His grandmother had smoked.

“Is it— is it weird to feel like I’m grieving myself?” Gerry asks after a while.

“I think it’s perfectly reasonable. You are dead, I mean. But you are also… here. You have the right to be upset about your own death, Gerry.” Jon says.

“Yeah, but, like, I’m also free now? Nothing’s my responsibility anymore. I can just… go. Poof. No more Gerry. No more getting dragged out of bed at three in the morning because mum says there’s a Dark Leitner on Rothby Street, or stuck in hospital again because I fucked up and got hurt when I should have been smart. It’s over, you know? There shouldn’t be anything to be missing, because I’m glad I don’t have to do that shit anymore. I’m a ghost.”

“That’s all true, but you only gained that freedom by giving up everything else. You lost… everything, Gerry. Personally, you’re a lot calmer about it than I would have been, in your place. You— you were free, Gerry, and then someone chose to take that away from you. Some force other than your own will trapped you. There’s plenty to grieve, in that.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess. I’m just so tired. I feel like I was waiting my whole life for the day I would fuck up and get killed, or have to sacrifice myself or something. Got followed around by the hateful ghost of my own mum, for fuck’s sake. I don’t think my attitude toward death is healthy. Not like I ever had anyone to miss me,”

“I’ll miss you.”

Gerry lifts their head at that, but doesn’t look at Jon. He’s done it again.

“I mean— I— I thought you were dead from the start, and it was… it was sad. You were a stranger I’d never met, or expected to meet, but from reading the Statements I felt like your death would be— or was, really, unfair. You lived, and you did good, but you never really got to live for yourself. That’s... I mean to say that I’ll grieve for you, Gerry. If you want.”

Gerry finally looks at him. Dark eyes ancient, form hazy in the sun, veiled by Jon’s smoke.

“Shouldn’t you be grieving yourself, too, then? Don’t think you’re getting to live too much for yourself either, Archivist.”

Jon can only stare back, unable to think around the grounding ache in his heart. He manages to tear his eyes away. Covers his mouth with a drag.

“Not quite sure that a symbolic loss of humanity is equal to dying, Gerry.”

“Well, I died, and all I lost was my humanity,” Gerry says with an infinitesimal trace of humor.

Jon can’t think of what to say. He’s considered his own death so much lately, but only in the contexts of prevention or immediacy. He’s never given thought to his own funeral. Would anyone left behind grieve his loss? Or would Jon’s death just be a relief? One less—

“You’re going to make a dramatic  _ one less monster  _ comment, aren’t you.” Gerry says. Jon clears his throat and pointedly does not.

Gerry laughs at him. Just a little. Exasperated. Tosses one hand over their eyes.

“Well, I just mean that, statistically, that is correct! I really doubt my ability to get out of this human, and— “

“And what? That makes your life not worth living? You’re kind of a drama queen, you know that? Like, here I am, a ghost, and you’re over here all  _ oh, if only I was human, then it would all be okay _ —”

“That is not what I meant, and you know it!”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Doesn’t mean you have to say it. Fuck humanity, who needs it? I’m getting on fine— well, except for all the pain. Might not be the best example, but it was the same when I was alive, honestly. Being human hurts, and it sucks. Being dead hurts. Guess being a monster should suck, too. Only fair.”

Jon— has never known a life without pain. He is intrinsically tied to his body, to the source of all his pain. It’s chronic and unending and meaningless. Suffering for the sake of suffering. There’s never been a use for complaint in that, in Jon’s mind. It didn’t cure him, to cry about it. But it did make him feel better, sometimes, to grieve his own body. To give up a whole day of his life to the pain that ruled him, turn on  _ Downtown Abbey _ and eat some cheesecake instead of going to work. It didn’t make the rest of his week not worth living. It stole some of his life from him, but it didn’t make him lesser. He lived, and it hurt. He was human, and it hurt.

Being the Archivist could be the same, if he let it. It hurt, and it stole parts of him, but at the end of the day, he is alive. It is not something he chose, but it is a part of him, now. A part of him was taken without payment by the supernatural, and Jon is left picking up the pieces of himself and dealing with the hurt it caused. He lived, and it sucked. He is a monster, and it sucks.

Can Jon grieve for his humanity while continuing to live with the pain of that loss? Well, he’s been doing pretty good at grieving pieces of himself for the last twenty years, he thinks.

“It’s not fair at all, actually,” Jon says, “But… I do understand. There is— “

From somewhere behind them, a window breaks. Jon and Gerry stare at one another.

A horrific noise bellows through the air. The birds fall silent. Something that shifts and climbs and crawls through a multitude of forms rushes through the parking lot, shooting for the thin, scraggly trees behind the hotel. Trevor and Julia give chase a few seconds behind it, whooping with laughter.

Silence descends on the empty parking lot. The birds tentatively restart their songs. Jon clears his throat and snubs the butt of his cigarette out in the plastic tray half buried under the bush. Finds a tape recorder laying in the leaves and ashes. Ignores it.

“Well,” says Gerry, “Suppose that’s our cue to return to the truck.”

“Looks like it.” Jon agrees. 

Neither of them move.

“...Do you want to come across the street with me? There’s a store I’d like to stop at.”

“Sure,” says Gerry, sounding relieved.

By the time the Hunters reappear, Jon has his face back on and his new phone activated. They bump shoulders as they walk, grinning wildly, and drag something thankfully unidentifiable around to the truck bed.

“May I take a photo of you?” Jon asks Gerry while they both ignore the bounce and settle of the truck in the early afternoon broad daylight. “I’m not certain how it will capture you, honestly.”

“Oh, hell yeah, I want to know. Take some spirit photos, Jon.”

Jon wrinkles his nose at the term, but dutifully takes a few shots of a dramatically posing Gerry. They lean over the phone, Gerry through the back of one of the seats, and stare at the results.

“Huh.” Gerry says, “Now  _ that  _ is pretty cool. Take more.”

“Oh, I will. Can’t have a wedding without a photo album, after all.”

Gerry cracks a smile, then ducks back when the doors swing open. Trevor jumps into the driver’s seat, this time. Jon stares. Julia drives just as meticulously and slowly as she does everything else. There’s a stately precision to her every action. Trevor? Jon doubts his license is real, if he even bothered to get one made. The old vampire killer is an enigma.

“You guys seriously just put those things together back there? What if they, I dunno, merge or something?” Gerry asks, more confused than judgemental.

“Oh, wouldn’t that be something  _ special? _ ” Trevor breathes, smiling wider. “ _ That _ healing with  _ that  _ shape-changing?”

“Be like Christmas come early,” Julia agrees.

“Stop encouraging them, Gerry,” Jon says mildly.

“Like the end of  _ Akira… _ ” Gerry says, haunted.

“Oh! I particularly enjoyed the conceit of the destruction of childhood in that film. Do you think— “ Jon starts.

Trevor punches the radio back on, peels out of the parking lot with a distinct lack of finesse, and they’re back on the road again.


	5. Thursday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which several proposals are made.

“—to answer your question, though, the continued cultural uses of henna in the diaspora living in England are—”

“Got your eyes on what’s following us, Julia?” Trevor interrupts Jon suddenly, flicking the low radio off. Sun’s not quite to setting. Julia sits up from her recline across the backseat and peers through the thin back windshield. Aside from the occasional question for Gerry, who is much more amenable to supernatural mentorhood when crouching in the middle of a truck barrelling down the American highway system than he was as a book, she hasn’t done much but read through all the brochures Jon picked up and occasionally ask if he ever stops talking.

He doesn’t, by the way. Jon’s not in the business of being a good hostage. Gerry’s made an artform of malicious compliance. They make quite a good debate team.

“Oh, I see it. Looks almost like a real car, doesn’t it?” she replies. Jon sighs and tries not to want to look, but he’s gotten a taste for Strangers recently and can sense it a few meters behind them easily now. He looks. It does look exactly like what a car should look like, but just enough of what it  _ should  _ look like that it doesn’t quite align with reality. The vague silhouette at the wheel is very still. Jon grimaces.

“Mall up ahead. Looks like abandoned construction sites off to the left. Sound any good, Julia?” Trevor asks, attention fixed on the rear view mirror more than the front windshield. As suspected, Jon is not as fond of his driving as he was of Julia’s.

“That’s a new one. Could be fun.”

“That isn’t going to fit in the back,” Gerard says derisively.

“Just have to shave some pieces off, then,” Trevor chuckles and does not use his turn signal for the exit.

Jon and Gerry get dropped off at the mall entrance like a pair of miscreant teenagers. Trevor winks at them, then pulls out so fast he leaves skidmarks on the pavement. The headlights switch off as he punches through the loose chain link fence around the empty construction site several kilometers further down. Keeps going. The Not-Car follows.

“Well,” says Gerry. “Never a dull moment.”

“Indeed.” says Jon. He hits the automated door button and they enter the mall as a police cruiser sweeps by. Jon’s just going to put what little remains of his faith in Trevor and Julia’s demonstrated abilities to not be arrested, and elects to ignore it.

First stop, food court. Jon has never been too fond of fast food, but he’s lost his taste for it entirely at this point. The variety here is much better than the way-side gallerias they’ve stopped at so far, for all that it looks identical to every other one of them.

The mall closes in an hour. Most of the people seated at the other tables in the wide dining area are in uniforms. Jon and Gerry are, functionally, alone.

“...Think we could find you something to wear for the wedding here?” Gerry asks.

Jon sips his boba. “Probably. Mind if it’s red?”

“It’s your wedding,” Gerry says in a tone that clearly evokes  _ it’s your funeral. _ Jon huffs at them. 

It’s only after Jon pulls the first decent dress he finds off the rack that he belatedly realizes that all he is going to find here is American fast fashion. Gerry, who has opted out of carrying anything or otherwise helping with the excuse of being non-corporeal, leans partially through the rack to give the offending item a raised brow.

“Not good enough for you, Jon?”

“Not in the least,” he says primly, reburying it in the overstuffed rack. 

“What are you aiming for? I can look around,”

Jon considers that. “Floor length or decently long, and red. I can find a wrap or something after I know what I’m working with.” Gerry nods and rises to their full height. 

“There’s some good ones along the back wall,” they offer, wandering off between the racks like a particularly out of place monographic giraffe. Jon approves of several of their choices and Gerry does well at masking how pleased they are about it. Considering all they can do is float and offer commentary, Jon has to commend them. He retrieves his pile of not-awful clothing and Gerry leans outside the stall.

“So,” says Gerry, popping their lips. “Archivist, eh.”

Jon snorts, drops his boots where he can stand on top of them instead of the floor. Hooks his cane around the top of the stall. “That your idea of subtle?”

“Oh, that’s even worse, actually, just wait. But no, you’re just… very different than Gertrude.”

“I’m getting the idea that this is a good thing, considering all that’s been revealed about her lately.”

“Yeah,” Gerry says quietly. Then, “She did something, right? To all the Assistants who died? Think she killed them? All of them, I mean,”

“Sacrificed at least two people that we know about, so likely the other Assistant’s deaths weren’t unrelated, no. Sorry you had to find out this way, for what it’s worth— oh, good lord,  _ shove off _ ,” The tape recorder that had appeared with its wrist strap hooked around a hanger gets shoved under the curtain with all the viciousness Jon can assert over a small quasi-supernatural, maybe-electronic device. Gerry snickers.

“Getrude never had that to deal with. Guess she might have just stomped them all out of existence so many times they gave up.” 

“I’m… not sure Gertrude wasn’t more human than me.” Jon admits to Gerry’s face, tugging open the curtain. Gerry’s eyebrows go up, first at Jon’s face, then the dress. It’s the most offensive of the bunch.

“Well…” they say diplomatically, not specifying which ill-fitting thing they’re unsure how to address.

“The straps,” Jon says in annoyance.

“Yeah, no.” Gerry agrees with a wince. Jon nods, pulls the curtain shut.

“You said you liked the Archivist powers, didn’t you?” they ask after a moment.

“I’d never been asked before. Don’t think I put much thought into it. I… I’ve been so very used to only acknowledging them in life or death circumstances, that it feels - it feels strange, to think of them otherwise. And they’re quite simple, really. Ask a question, get the truth. Ask for a Statement, receive one. I… did blackmail a man, once.”

“Really? What he do?”

“Wouldn’t give me the papers I needed,” Jon admits shamefully. Spelled out to someone else’s judgement, it seems so much clearer than how it compares to the transactional ease of it in his own mind. “I wouldn’t even begin to know how to go through with it! I have no idea why I did, it just seemed like the path of least resistance, at the time. I mean, his darkest secret was accepting bribes as a traffic cop, so honestly it could have gone much worse than that. I think he was just scared that anyone found out, considering no other cop would actually care about that and he would likely have gotten off without so much as a slap on the wrist. Haven’t done it since, though.”

This dress gets a shrug of indifference. Jon feels about the same.

“You use your powers on everyone like that? When you need answers, I mean.”

Jon has to think about that. Does he? It feels like it, but he has so little to show for it.

“Is— is it a bad thing to say that I don’t know? I didn’t know anything was happening to me for the longest time, and by the time I finally realized something was going wrong, I had already started using them? Or it might just have been a conditioning effect of my questions always being answered. I’ve grown so used to it. And it’s hard to avoid. Maybe I’m just not— not trying hard enough, but I can’t always tell when it’s happening. Sometimes I’ll forget myself and ask a question, and nothing happens. Other times I’ll ask someone how their day was and they start giving me a detailed account of the panic attack they had in their car over being late to work today and how they’re trapped and can’t afford to quit. It— it feels so much more like something that happens to me, rather than something that I do. Does— does that make sense?”

This dress gets a nod. “I like that one. But yeah, that sounds frustrating. Too bad evil eldritch gods of fear and pain don’t come with training manuals. But it is still you, isn’t it? Gotta open your mouth for a question to come out. You do anything to get away from it?”

“Yes, yes, the ethics of personal responsibility and autonomy of action, I’ve been lectured. But I… don’t feel like I can get away from it? It’s… there’s a ritual to end the world fast approaching, and there are so few people who can do anything about it other than me. And the rest of the Archives, I mean. But time is crucial, and answers are what we need. I really hadn’t thought about whether or not I like my abilities because there simply hasn’t been the time or— or the downtime, I suppose, to do so. I haven’t had the luxury of peace to consider the morality of wielding power. I— I feel guilty, sometimes, with it, but that can’t stop me from using it, because not using it hasn’t been a choice. And knowing now how Gertrude kept her humanity intact by sacrificing the lives of others… I don’t want that either. Are those my only options? Become a monster physically and minimize the damage done to others by putting it all on myself, or become a monster by valuing my own humanity and life above all else?”

“This is the worst one yet,” Gerry tells him. Jon turns to examine the dress from the back in the triptych mirror.

“Really? I quite like it. Not exactly appropriate, though,” he allows the divergence before facing Gerry. The ghost looks contemplative. Doesn’t appear in the mirror at Jon’s side.

“Don’t think I can help you on that one. I mean, I stayed human, and I’ve been told I was a good person,” they flash a wry little smile at that, “But I wasn’t, like, cosmically chosen to be  _ the Archivist _ , so. Different stakes for different, uh, rogue supernatural elements?”

“That’s… true enough. And I was capitalistically chosen, for your information. No divine intervention on this one. I do get a paycheque out of it,” Jon sighs. “Stop me from making a dramatic metaphor about selling my humanity for overtime pay?”

Gerry snorts. “Yeah, putting my foot down on that one. You can dramatize everything else well enough without the cliches.”

“It’s not a cliche if it’s real, Gerry. And I’m hardly dramatic.”

Gerry actually laughs at that. Which is rude, but Jon forgives them for sounding so relaxed. Jon struggles briefly with the closures on the next dress, eyeing the red blinking light of another tape recorder sticking out of the pocket of his folded sweatpants.

“Respectfully disagree. But, I mean, if we’re considering a— a cosmic scale of morality with Gertrude on one end, just do the opposite of whatever she did but also the same thing because it worked. Should be easy enough,” Gerry jokes.

“Wonderful. I’ll get right on that.”

“Well. You haven’t sacrificed any Assistants for the greater good yet, have you?”

“No. And I certainly don’t plan to. Can’t say that any of them are fond of me anymore, but. They’re alive. That’s not to say that they trust me to keep them that way,”

“Something happen? Or did you do some Archivist thing that scared them off?” 

“Sort of? Both? I— there was an agent of the Stranger, the Not-Them, and—”

“The face stealer?”

“Yes, that’s it. It— it killed Sasha, one of my Assistants, and none of us knew for almost a year. I was just far enough down my own path that I could sense that something was off, but I couldn’t even begin to guess what. It triggered a deep paranoia in me, and with the influence of the Not-Them hiding itself, I ended up suspecting everyone else, of. Well, of everything. Figured one of them had killed Gertrude. Drove them up the wall pretty badly. I don’t really deserve their trust, at this point. But I— I want to trust them? At least, I think I do. But somehow it doesn’t feel like a natural impulse anymore. It’s like I just can’t make myself do it,”

Gerry hums thoughtfully for a moment. “Gertrude interacted with avatars or whatever they're called more than I did. Sure, I met some, but never really sat down to ask where they were in the process, you know? But she said they were… frozen. Like, from what she gathered from the statements, it looked like they got overtaken by one powerful emotion that keyed them into it and that was that. That one big thing would be all they could really focus on anymore, and all their other feelings get pushed aside. No power to them, and whatever type of weird immortality they’ve got just froze them right into place with only that one emotion left. Not sure how much stock to actually put in her opinion, anymore, though,” Gerry finishes thoughtfully.

Jane Prentiss, seeking only to be consumed by love. Mike Crew, eternally chasing freedom. Jude Perry’s sadistic adoration of destruction. 

Jon’s curiosity.

Jude chose to lite herself on fire. Mike chose Leitner after Leitner until his choice resonated with the freedom he wanted. Jane - well, Jane was full of worms. Jon’s not entirely sure about her level of agency or perhaps singularity anymore. Agnes Montague chose to hope, and saved the world with only that, destroying herself in the process.

Does Jon feel frozen, himself? Trapped in amber in some terror-stricken moment of unknown choice? Maybe. He certainly feels trapped. He needs to know more about the situation he’s been forced into, about the very things keeping him trapped. Is that pursuit of knowledge a just one, or a selfish one for his own sake: chasing the high of an emotional fulfillment he can no longer achieve any other way? Chasing the answers that only his power can get him? Enjoying the heightened power those answers give him in turn?

Is all that Jon is now a one-dimensional worshipper of knowledge? Of beholding the truth? Getting the answers to painful questions? It’s a heavy concept, and it strikes at the core of him. Unanswerable. Except for how it is: Jon  _ chose  _ this. Somehow, somewhere, every crossroads he landed at handed him two choices and he forsook the human one at every turn. Elias was right. Jon has done this to himself.

But he can’t stop. He’s already too well entrenched in the plot; he needs to see this to the end. Elias might have made him face the truth, but Gerry is making him face himself.

_ Do you like them? _ they’d asked. And Jon had said yes. He did. He likes his powers, now that he knows of them. Knows what he can get from them. If he could give them up, go back to being human, would he? 

He’ll just have to make human choices where he can.

“...Jon?”

Jon lets out a breath. Pulls the curtain back.

“Maybe.” he says. “Maybe it’s true, but that also sounds like an excuse. Just because an avatar can’t— just because I can’t naturally trust someone doesn’t mean I can’t choose to do so. I mean, I’m— I’m halfway there, aren’t I? And if so, I shouldn’t care about any of this beyond curiosity for how it ends, but I do. I want to trust them. I never met you before, but I care about what happens to you. I mean, I might not have— I can’t really say I care all too much for Julia or Trevor, so I must be choosing to care about you on purpose. If all it takes to— to become an avatar is a choice or two, then there’s no reason to not simply keep choosing to trust. Philosophically, I mean.”

“You… care about me? On purpose?”

Jon blinks, realizing his continued stare off into space, and examines Gerry. The ghost looks— enraptured. They lean forward from the wall, completely focused on Jon. Brows high, dark eyes big and searching. Jon. Did in fact say that. Best to own up to it. Jon is very good at doubling down on his choices, if nothing else. He raises his chin.

“Yes. I… I choose to, whether or not I really can.”

Gerry blinks slowly. “Okay,” they say. “Yeah, yeah, alright.” Clears their throat. “That one.”

Jon blinks, touches the red synthetic silk. “Yes,” he agrees. “This is the one.”

Out in the main lobby, Gerry consults a map kiosk before joining Jon at a bench beside a tacky fountain full of pennies, apparently with a mission of their own in mind. Jon stretches a bit, glad to have a break from standing stationary for so long. Gets a text from Julia that simply reads ‘Whenever you’re ready.’ Relays her perfect grammar to Gerry, and still gets no answer as to their current fixation. They travel to the opposite end of the mall with ten minutes to spare to closing.

“Here,” Gerry says with a secret sort of excitement. Jon can’t help but smile back and follow them into the dimly lit shop. “Hold on, I need to see what we’ve got here,” 

Jon is— yes, okay, this is very much a  _ Gerry  _ sort of shop. There isn’t much here Jon would choose to wear on his own time, but Gerry looks quite at ease.

“Here!” Gerry crows after a few minutes.

Jon turns to find them fighting back a grin. “Jon,” they say firmly, “I am incorporeal. Can you pick this up for me?”

“Sure?”

Jon squeezes between several poorly placed, overcrowded racks that almost catch on his cane and joins them in a small alcove lined with rings. Gerry points. Jon plucks it from the wall. Turns it over in his hands.

Faux silver plating. Bulky, cast design. Unfiled flaws. Large, tacky red-glass stones. 

“Try it on,” Gerry encourages. “Ring finger.” Jon raises his eyebrows but obliges. It fits, though the plastic ring holding it to the cardstock makes it awkward. Gerry clears their throat in a perfectly affected manner. “Jonathan Sims. I’ve known you for…”

“Fifty two hours,” Jon supplies, amused.

“Fifty two hours, and I would like to spend the rest of my life with you. Will you marry me?”

Jon laughs, just a bit.

“Think it’s a bit late for that, isn’t it?”

“Well, I figured it would be better late than never. What do you say?”

Jon sighs, grinning to match Gerry. “How could I turn down such a romantic proposal? I would be honored to marry you, Gerry.”

Gerry beams, lip rings glinting in the dull lighting. Cold brushes against Jon’s still hands, and he blinks away from Gerry’s dark eyes to see the ghost’s hands are settled under his. They’re cupped gently around where he holds the ring, large and bone-white and covered in eyes and scars. The ring really fits him. Jon swallows hard, holds it close.

“Till death do us part,” says Gerry.

The parking lot is nearly empty and pitch black around the buzzing spotlights when they finally step out into the night. Julia’s truck is parked beside the outlet to the on-ramp, scratched, dented, and noticeably sagging in the back.

“Hm. Well, haven’t missed our ride,” says Jon.

“Probably all that we can say about it,” says Gerry.

And then Jon— reaches out. Thoughtlessly. Looking the other way down the road, just in case a rogue vehicle makes that blind turn. Raises his free arm without thinking.

It’s like plunging his hand into a stream of air from a vent. Gerry stiffens, stills. Jon jolts, curls his hand slowly out of Gerry’s incorporeal elbow, not even a whisper of real sensation on his chilled fingertips. The metal ring is like a band of ice.

“I— I’m sorry,” he fumbles at the same time Gerry says, “That won’t work— ”

They look at each other quietly for a moment. There’s nothing they can say. Gerry is dead.

Gerry looks away first. Nods, just once, like something disappointing but not unexpected has been explained to him.

“Gerry,” Jon says carefully, “One more day.”

Gerry turns back with a smile that hurts to see. “Yeah,” they say. “Can’t be late for our wedding.”


	6. Friday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which last dates are contemplated, and nothing is easy.

Jon is awakened, unmedicated for the third day in a row, in what he can only describe as a blind rage.

“Do it, Jon,” Gerry cajoles, absolutely delighted with Jon’s abysmal mood swing, “Make them regret inconveniencing our peaceful rests with their servitude to bloodlust. I know you want to. _I_ want you to.”

Jon is probably not going to yell at the Hunters who have a truck full of Stranger not-corpses and five more guns than they logically need. Probably. But getting cold called at three in the morning by Julia and only being instructed to ‘get in the truck’ is testing his limits.

The humid air that hits his face when they step out of the latest skeevy roadside motel sets his teeth farther on edge. Jon can just _feel_ it frizzing his hair and fraying what’s left of his patience. After a brief wait that is far more aggravating than it should be, the truck screeches to a halt in front of them. The truck bed sags low over the tires. At some point the front bumper has fallen off, for whatever fucking reason. Jon hates the truck.

Jon marches over and slams the door open. Flips off the radio. Looks a startled, but slowly blinking Julia Montauk in the eye and does _not yell_ when he snarls _“Do not wake me up for anything less than a five car pileup.”_

“...Well.” she says, “Alright then,”

Gerry whistles from the back, but Jon is angling for unconsciousness too aggressively to care.

The next time Jon wakes up, the sun is high in the sky.

“Welcome to sunny Nevada.”

Jon turns his head and squints at Julia. She’s got her seat reclined back further than it should be for active driving and her arm out the window. It’s twelve in the afternoon. His mouth is full of cotton. Jon groans.

Julia grunts in some kind of agreement.

“Where— where’s Gerry and Trevor?”

“Checkin’ the back for damage. Don’t know how you slept through all that. Kind of impressed, actually.”

Jon stares at the bland, billboard lined road, packed wall to wall with traffic. They’re right in the middle of a five line interstate, the turn signal clicking. Jon groans again, scrubs at his face. All he’s doing is sitting, but his whole scar aches, bone deep. 7/10 and all his joints itch with it. An uncomfortable, manic energy clings to his bones and he grits his teeth against it. Jon is never getting in another car for as long as he lives.

Julia clears her throat. “You, uh, wanna put your makeup on? We’ll be here awhile before we can drop you two off somewhere. Get to tracking down our thing.” Jon is absurdly grateful for her incredibly blunt personality. If she was the type to ask questions, he would absolutely bite her head off.

He uses one of the million water bottles rattling around to wash his face and immediately feels more human for it. Julia pulls his mediocre replacement makeup kit out of the back and drops it on the middle partition instead of on Jon’s lap because she has a modicum of intelligence. Thank his horrible fear-not-god for deciding to throw on the other dress he picked up yesterday instead of his pants. Stripping in a truck with Julia Montauk is not on Jon’s bucket list, but rolling his hem up obscenely high to attach his drug store TENS unit is. Well, when in Rome. Makes it easier to doff his prosthetic and get that last little bit of relief.

Jon frowns, stuck with looking between the small mirror on his visor shade and the tiny compact attached to the powder as he draws his left brow back on. Julia moves the truck out of neutral and inches forward.

“God’s sake, here,” she says, and then unclips the visor completely from the ceiling, easily breaking the plastic hinges holding it in place, and leans it on the dashboard’s overhang, directly in Jon’s line of sight. In the process, the mirror briefly reflects the truck bed, which is now missing its roof. Gerry and Trevor are laying on the heavily dented and stained floor, gesturing animatedly with their hands.

“Thanks,” he says weakly. Gets to start filling in the dent in his upper lip before Julia decides to engage in social contact. A rarity, for her. Jon has discovered that she’s more of a solid night out drinking, supportive clap on the shoulder sort of person than anything else. Jon thinks they get on well enough.

“You do this every day, then?”

Jon hums, blunts the pencil on his palm to a better angle. It smears. The wonders of off-brand American products never cease. “Only if I want to, really. It’s just easier, some days.”

“Hm. Can’t imagine having the patience for that. Don’t think I’d look any good with it, either.”

“Never played with it as a kid?” he asks, toeing the line.

Julia only snorts. “Think a single dad on the hunt would’ve watched youtube tutorials with me?”

“He very well might have. No interest in making up for it now? We’re already all trapped together, might as well make it a girl’s night. I don’t believe we could share palettes, unfortunately.”

Julia snorts. “Does being the only other girl around make me your maid of honor by default?”

“Oh, god, it might. We’ll be needing witnesses, at the very least. Does being involved in our wedding not fill you with honor, Julia?”

“Might have if it was real.”

Jon freezes for a moment. Finishes zipping the bag closed. “I’m sure I don't know what you mean—” he tries.

“I’m not as gullible as Trevor. It’s fine, quit freaking out, I don’t care.”

“Then, why haven’t you said anything? Why bother with this whole charade?”

Julia looks Jon in the eye, expression bland and firm as always, but with a steely conviction in her eyes. “Trevor’s not stupid, either. He really knows what he’s on about, with this family stuff.”

Jon breathes out, startled by the honesty of that. Releases his hold on the bag.

“Besides, you two look happy enough about it. Got a fancy wedding ring and everything. Cute.”

“Y-yes, well,” Jon splutters at her teasing, getting whiplash from the conversation.

“Got another question for you, Jon. Why’re we dreaming about you.” It’s much less of a question than it could be. There’s a coiled steel in Julia’s lounge. A firm set to her calm stare out the windshield. Julia does not mince words, when she bothers to engage. Jon is not a good liar. He’s rapidly becoming unsure if he is capable of lying at all. He faces Julia.

“I—I’m not entirely sure why it happens, honestly. Sometimes, when people give me Statements, it, well, produces nightmares about it. And I’m there, but I’m there as the Archivist. For me, they aren’t lucid. I know your Statement, so I can easily guess what the dream is about, but truthfully I don’t recall the exact dreams, myself. Not usually, I mean. I’m… sorry. Is it invasive?”

Julia hums quietly. “Nah. Just weird. Same thing every night, so far. You, around the corners, or sitting in a conference chair while we tear apart the Dark cult’s stupid ritual. Get to do that every night, now.”

“ _We?_ So it really is you and Trevor, together? I’ve never had that happen, before. Do you remember it exactly the same way?”

“Damn, at least pretend to be contrite about it. You’re the type of monster that gives people nightmares and you’re all— academic about it,” Julia says, less than impressed. Tinge of amusement. Jon winces.

“Sorry, really. I just know so little about my abilities that I always end up finding out about them the hard way. It’s not like I’m excited that it happens, but it’s good to know, when new things occur, what the boundaries might be.”

“You could be using the Strangers to test it, then, you know? Trevor and I’re having our fun with them, no problem to hold them down and let you have a go. Might even find out something juicy about their locations, or that Unknowing business.”

Jon, god help him, is tempted. It’s abominable. Probably. That is not a good thing to do, nor is it the human option. Or is it? Jon’s abilities are something of a continued mystery, and he’s been hurting others with accidentally compelling questions and recurring nightmares. If he doesn’t know what damage he can do, how can he mitigate it? Harm reduction is only possible if one knows what it is a reduction of.

But another part of Jon is _excited_ for the opportunity to find out.

Gerry isn’t here to bounce morality off of. Gerry will not be here to guide Jon down a better path, soon enough. This should be no one’s choice but his own. This is not a responsibility that should be placed on anyone but Jon, anyway. Still, he longs to talk it out with Gerry.

But what is the correct choice, if there is such a notion as ‘correctness’ when it comes to issues of morality? Julia merges to head down an exit, but Jon is left at the crossroads. Is it better, more noble, for him to say no? To continue to live in ignorance because it is bliss to him personally, while those around him wait for the next time he hurts them in new supernatural ways, just because it directly prevents Stranger blood on his own hands in the short term? Is taking Julia up on her offer a direct acceptance of responsibility for his terrible power and a learning exercise to control it with the least amount of damage to innocent parties possible, or is it just an excuse for Jon to be violent and inhuman and please that terrible power at the first opportunity to do so?

Jon has never had to consider the ethics of power from the side of the powerful before. Walk away from this opportunity in the name of his own humanity— is that just performative? Seize the opportunity to learn important information— is it just an excuse?

“What about you,” he compels, “ _Why do you hunt them?_ ”

“Because I _love_ it,” Julia purrs, that slow bearing of teeth in deadly joy overtaking her face. “I want to catch them, and make them _hurt_ for what they’ve done. I want to _end_ them before they can ever lay hands on anyone else’s family. I want to tear them apart like they tore my family apart.”

A car honks directly beside them.

“Jon.” she says, still smiling.

“That— that one was on purpose,” he admits immediately, because Julia is terrifying. He takes a breath, lets it out. “I—” he says. “Let me think about it.”

Julia’s smile is bright and bloodthirsty, and she meets Jon’s stare with excitement. The non-feeling pressure-thrum of blood-hunt-chase-power is intoxicating on her.

“Consider it your wedding gift,” she says.

Jon is saved from having the time to regret his choices by Trevor knocking on the back window. Julia unlocks the truck. Gerry slides in through the back windshield with a weird, still motion that makes Jon’s eyes twitch. Trevor opens the door like a living person.

“Lookin’ like a whole new person there, Jon!” Trevor says.

“That’s the idea,” Jon drawls, still reeling but slowly relaxing as he considers how much easier this makes the cramped trip feel. The more genuine camaraderie between himself and Julia. The equally genuine anticipation that has settled something inside him, something hungry, something that he must acknowledge. That is the entire reason he had undertaken this trip to begin with— the Unknowing.

He is the Archivist. It is his duty to learn this information, isn’t it? Perhaps he has been approaching this dilemma from the wrong direction— considering the path is he on to be cleanly split between ‘more human’ and ‘less human’. Maybe it is simply different decisions with different consequences.

“Can we have the radio back now, Jon?” Gerry asks, cold slipping through Jon’s shoulder briefly, bringing him out of his head.

“Ah, yes. Low volume please.”

“So, anything left of it?” Julia asks, ignoring Gerry’s groaning and Jon and Trevor’s winces as she finds the nearest country station with eerie accuracy and turns it up.

“Nope, not a one. Whole thing mixed together. We got a hell of a day coming up, Julia.” Trevor crows joyfully.

“...What thing?” Jon asks cautiously.

“I was right,” Gerry says with vicious delight.

“Came out looking like a motorcycle, can you believe it! Two riders, I saw!”

“Just absorbed each other, Jon, you really missed it— “

And just like that, they pass the state line into Nevada.

A few hours later, Julia drops Jon and Gerry off outside the beauty parlor. They’ve got a bead on the Many-Stranger, and Jon hates the truck. The takeoff of the thing from the bed unbalanced the transition and the tires are low on air. It _bounces_. As if he wasn’t uncomfortable enough, honestly. His pain has actually deigned to cooperate with him for once, and has settled at 5/10 instead of trying to convince him to kill Julia every time she hit a pothole. Just being upright and out of the vehicle has improved his situation immensely.

“Well, how are you today, Gerry?” Jon asks wryly after he collapses on a bench. Gerry snorts at him, stays standing. Floating. As Gerry does.

“Eh, same soul-agony, different day. Nothing different from being out of the book for so long, which is good, I guess. Gonna head in?” Jon puffs out a breath.

“Yes, just— one second, actually.” When he looks up after pocketing his lighter, Gerry is watching him curiously.

“What? I don’t believe you’re in the position to be judging my health choices,”

“No, no.” Gerry says, still looking him over, “Just waiting.”

Jon hums, but lets them be.

He gets to take two drags of his cigarette before the garbage cans lined up outside the alleyway nearest them explode outward. A massive motorcycle blasts through the street, weaving nimbly around the light traffic. To Jon’s Eyes, the figure atop it is only nominally two separate people, with a few too many grasping arms to be human.

It’s a sports car that gives chase, but Jon Knows that Julia is at the wheel. It is much less nimble in dodging other cars, but it drifts around the corner impressively once it gets there. Jon is grateful he dropped his luggage off at the hotel instead of trusting it to the whims of the truck.

“Huh,” says Jon, because there isn’t anything else to say to that.

“Well I’ll be damned— oh, wait, _I am_ _._ ” says Gerry. Jon laughs a bit, puts out his cigarette.

“Ought to be heading in to my appointment, I think. Sure you’ll be alright on your own for so long?”

“Yeah, gonna walk around and see if anyone tries to mug me for a lark. Uh— just— where exactly did you get that lighter, again?”

“What? Oh, it was… it must have been a gift, I think?” Jon frowns, thinking back. It is a nice flint lighter; a heavy metal number with fine engraving. The sort of useful vintage item that his grandmother had always preferred. But Jon cannot for the life of him recall the occasion that had warranted it.

“Huh,” says Gerry. “Well, hope you figure it out. See you.” And then they are gone.

Jon finds Gerry lazing in the waiting area after his appointment is over. It went fine. He got fawned over by three separate artists for knowing their dialects, and he didn’t have the heart to correct them on how he really truly did not until that moment. One of them had a Statement about the Dark.

He made the right choice.

Jon holds out his arms for inspection. He’s had to make several condescensions to the traditional placements and get nothing on his palms or the areas where his crutches sit. If it had been the actual ceremony, he could have done it in full at his home, with the support of the bridal party, but alas— Jon is alone in America and marrying a ghost. Is that another thing he’s lost that should be mourned for? If Jon ever gets married again, he’d like a full ceremony. The parts he has been able to participate in have been remarkably grounding.

His rings are off so as to not smear anything, but Gerry’s hands curve under his in the same way as when they proposed. Jon almost holds his breath.

“We match. A proper pair of watchers, we are,” Gerry murmurs finally, that bright, wicked gleam coming back into their eyes as they smile. “I’ll make a goth of you, yet, Jon.”

Jon smiles back, glad they appreciate the non-traditional elements he requested be added to the design.

“Trevor let me know that they’re going to be driving around for a while yet, so… how’s a date sound?” Gerry asks as they walk back down the street.

Jon blinks at that and concentrates more fully on his balance. A date? With Gerard Keay? It should absolutely not have him in a bit of a tizzy, being that they are engaged to be married tomorrow, but it does. Jon has not been on a real date in years. Granted, he hasn’t really wanted to, but the sudden reality of it leaves him a bit breathless.

“Yes, I— I would love to go on a date with you, Gerry.” he manages.

“Little out of order, innit?” they ask brightly, sounding delighted by the incongruity of it.

“Just a bit,” Jon replies just to say something. They both glance at each other. Away.

“I, uh. Got us reservations,” Gerry admits. “Place up ahead. Figured you’d want to head to the hotel soon, but I know how you feel about fast food, so.” They shrug. “Only went about as far as I could get before the pull of the page started to really hurt.”

“Gerry, you didn’t need to push yourself,” Jon scolds.

“Hey, if you get to limp all over Nevada, so do I. Ready?”

Jon sighs at the upscale atmosphere of the restaurant Gerry leads them to. His cheap dress and single disposable flipflop bearing the henna on his foot do not quite fit the formal atmosphere. It’s not often Jon allows himself to feel self conscious, so he steels himself and nods, ignoring it. At least his hair looks good.

They are seated at a tiny table near a window that offers a view of the boulevard, lined as it is with busy shops and unhurried shoppers. The sky is a pure, bright blue, edging into sunset. The tablecloth is white and the waiter pulls out Jon’s chair for him. Jon agrees to the wine, then automatically looks to Gerry. Gerry smirks very sweetly and asks for a glass.

And then they are alone. A tall, thin candle flickers between them. Jon flips through the menu, refusing to look at the prices. Gerry laces their hands together under their chin and watches the sky.

It’s quiet, in the restaurant. Not the travel-sore quiet of a tired truck, or the emptiness of a hotel room. There’s a soft chatter from the other patrons, the clink of wine glasses, tasteful piano music. It’s another sort of waiting quiet, but what they wait for in this is more time together. No attacks. No quick getaways. Just Jon and Gerry alone together. On a date.

“My god— are we _dating?_ ” Jon blurts out.

“Fuck, I think we are,” says Gerry, sounding just as blindsided and bewildered.

They just look at one another blankly for a moment, Gerry’s black eyes glistening in the candlelight, before laughing. It’s a relief, honestly.

“Oh, fuck, I’m sorry? I think? I’ve never actually properly dated anyone before, so don’t judge my performance too harshly,” Gerry says, mirthful with the revelation.

“What— really? Well, for a first time, this is lovely. Aside from the hostage situation, and all.” Jon reassures. Who wouldn’t want to date Gerard Keay? Jon would date Gerard Keay. Jon _is_ dating Gerard Keay— _Jon is going to marry Gerard Keay._ His head is suddenly spinning. The wine appears just in time for him to fortify himself.

Gerry sets one hand on their own glass in a parody of holding. Their hands are very large, with long, elegant fingers that look lovely up against the stem of a wine glass. The stark lines of their tattoos stand out brightly, wink under the shifting light of the flickering candle and slowly pinking sun.

Jon can see the next table over through them.

The lip of his glass stills at his mouth. Gerry is not sad— they mourn what was stolen from them, not for what will become of them soon. Jon will respect that. He almost sets the glass atop a tape recorder that brazenly appeared on the tabletop. He elects to ignore it.

“Well, I mean, I have gone on dates, sort of. Just one night stands and day-only sort of deals. Didn’t want to drag anyone into something they should be ignorant of. And mum got real weird about all her precious _bloodline_ and _family business_ nonsense. Certainly wasn’t about to bring anyone home, you know? Not sure what to do on a date that isn’t about to end, really.” Gerry says thoughtfully.

Jon has the opposite philosophy. His shortest relationship was eight months, though his longest still to date was his two years with Georgie. Jon’s never been anything but repulsed by sex, so the idea of wanting only that and using a date as lead up to such a disappointing conclusion is absurd to him. But this situation is odd— the conclusion of their relationship will be death. This date means so much more than a single point in time, to both of them. This is their first date, nominally, but they’ve done nothing but speak intensely and get to know one another for the last few days. Every moment without the Hunters at their sides has been spent alone, together, in retrospective relationship negotiation. In support of one another’s battles with their personal demons.

So far, Jon has liked what he’s seen.

Tomorrow, they will be married.

Odd time for a first date, but _c'est la vie_.

Jon sets his glass down. “Normally, this is the time to get to know one another. Ah, jobs and hobbies and interests and the like. Not the conditions of morality among men and monsters, unfortunately.”

“Damn, that’s all my best conversational pieces. But let’s do that— talk about date things, I mean. Get away from it all for a bit. Take a break.”

“A night to ourselves doesn’t sound bad at all. So, Gerry, got any hobbies?”

“Nope.” Gerry says immediately, smirking.

“Oh, you have to have been doing _something_ ,” Jon frowns at them.

“Yeah, I mean, I dunno. Had a lot of downtime, between book hunts and with all the traveling. Did a lot of sight seeing, when I could get away from it. I know I did something to fill my time. Mostly just things that needed to be done. Patching clothes up, researching, listening to music, painting, reading normal books because it was nice sometimes to remember they exist… practical stuff, I guess.”

“Well, what sort of books? I have to imagine them being quite something to offer more entertainment than the average Leitner.”

Gerry snorts, tucks a thin strand of hair behind their ear. “Eh, I don’t have exacting tastes. Mum was all about prizes and awards and rarity, so I liked to find the chapbooks, self published, off-genre, that sort of thing. Had subscriptions to some queer anthologies and zine houses. It’s nice, I think, to find those quieter voices and just appreciate something made by another person. No ghostwriting in vampire on werewolf erotic pulp, if you know what I mean. Just pure human feeling.”

“About unrealistic vampires?”

“And unrealistic werewolves. And unrealistic sex. The more ridiculous it gets, the more I like it, honestly. No one’s trying to please the masses with generic formulas if the expected audience is their ten friends and their D&D group. It’s just more… hm. Guess I shouldn’t say ‘human’ as a blanket term for good things, huh. Bit insensitive innit.”

Jon huffs fondly. “I think you can be forgiven for the oversight, Gerry. But I understand what you mean. I could never bring myself to read more than one book by the same author. I feel that once you have read one narrative of theirs, you already know their voice and the mysteries of the plot become too easy to puzzle out early. There just isn’t the same element of discovery to reading if you’ve already met the author. I suppose doing as you’ve done and seeking out new voices would prevent that from happening.”

“Yeah, huh. I guess I never really did end up following any one creator in particular. I really like debut works, mostly. The sort of feeling they give you that this person is still trying to find themself in their prose, but thinks that writing a single chapbook will get it all out once and for all. I’ve always liked that feeling. Didn’t really matter how talented they were at writing, it was the creation that interested me. Like, being able to really sit down with a book and get into it and try to figure out _why_ the author used this call back or _that_ metaphor, what it meant to them personally, instead of the big greats all writing in a circle around one another. All the popular stuff gets boring once you’ve read what they’re all working from. Like, if I ever had to see another Frankensteinian conceit for the sheer literary value of _Frankenstein_ , I’ll _die_ ,”

Jon chuckles at that, watching Gerry’s hands outline their sentences animatedly. “Oh, I know what you mean. Personally, I’m exhausted by the mere mention of deconstruction anymore. But I do like to keep up with the larger awards and the top twenty lists, just to keep a sort of gauge on the cultural consensus of new books. It’s fascinating to see what a generalized society will accept and laude as high brow literature once it has been pre-approved via committee. You… you mentioned chapbooks, though. I never quite kept up with that scene, but you are referring to poetry volumes, correct?”

Gerry nods, absently playing with a strand of their hair. “Oh, yeah. I think poetry’s the realest sort of writing, honestly. It’s the most personal, since it’s supposed to be communicating the self, instead of the ideas and concepts that make up a person’s thoughts crammed into a bigger plot. People can get lost in books, I think. But poetry’s where you can find them again. If a book makes you cry, it’s because the author made it sad on purpose, but if a poem gets to you, that’s genuine. You know?”

“I— I think I do.” Jon admits. “I’ve always loved books, but it was never about the individual book, just the reading. What I could take away from it, and then carry on into the next. A sort of web of understanding. Poetry has always been hard for me to get lost in because there isn’t anything to find, in that sense. There’s no moralistic outcome modeled on Kant that the narrative guides one to finding between the lines. Poetry always seemed frivolous, in comparison, with its emotive focuses extending over the objective talent of the author or the clumsiness of the narrative. But I suppose there is value in that, if one is looking for a whole person, without the facade of academia superimposed overtop.”

“That’s a really longwinded way to say you don’t like poetry, Jon,” Gerry says fondly, cheek leaned on their fist. Jon isn’t pedantic enough to tell them to get their elbow off the table. They’re dead; they can do as they please.

“I— I didn’t say I didn’t _like_ it,” Jon blusters. “Be-besides, it sounds like a lovely interpretation of a writing medium. Perhaps I can try some poetry with your lens of a bared individual in mind, and I might find myself enjoying it more. Do you have any recommendations?”

“Oh, sure. It’ll remain to be seen if it’s up to your standards, but there’s a few local Londoners I remember enjoying— “

The date lasts four hours. Jon orders an entree, Gerry orders a dessert and holds their plate for Jon. Jon drinks their wine. By the end of it, Jon is in love. This is not unusual, but the speed and intensity at which it grabs hold of him is one he hasn’t felt in a long time. He wasn’t aware of how much he missed having these sorts of feelings. It isn’t often that Jon just clicks into place with someone.

They take a cab to the hotel because Jon’s leg is still a bastard, and now he’s a little tipsy. Not the best walking conditions on their own, but it’s now fully dark, aside from how bright the constant advert signs are.

“ —dunno, really, but it just felt like I got so bitter, in the end, you know? Like, I lost everything or never had it to begin with, and then all I could think to do was try to mitigate everything mum and her precious Leitner did. Like, sure, it was a good action, but nothing that went into it felt like I meant it to be good? If I found every Leitner in an empty room, not hurting anything, I would still have burned it. Just on principle. Just because the outcomes were, I— I dunno, it never made me feel better. Satisfied, I guess? But it was all way too little, way too late. It was just the least I could do. Stopped feeling like a mission and started to feel more… I dunno, like some kind of filler. Couldn’t think of any other way to live.” Gerry laments while Jon tips the blessedly understanding cab driver more than he should, but considering the dinner bill he might as well just max out the card, at this point.

“Sill, it was so much more than what anyone else was capable of, Gerry. Net positive for the world at large, yes, but very much at the expense of your own happiness is— it’s just not right. I’m sorry that happened to you, in the way that it did. If you had been able to start up against Leitner on your own terms, would you— oh, _Leitner!_ Gerry!”

“What? Gerry asks, half laughing as Jon stumbles to a halt outside the hotel, completely distracted.

“I haven’t gotten to tell you about Leitner yet! I should inform you that he was recently discovered and brutally murdered.”

The smile that overtakes Gerry’s face is blinding in it’s honesty. They laugh like relief.

“Oh,” they gasp, “Oh, fuck, what got him?”

“Elias Bouchard, unfortunately. In my office, with a pipe.”

“No,” Gerry breathes. “I can’t picture it! That manicure? On a pipe? How did he hit hard enough?”

“I know, right? It was absurd! Blood everywhere. They gave him an unmarked grave next to Gertrude.”

“Oh, she has to be spinning in her coffin on that one,”

“At this rate, I don’t think she’ll ever stop. Oh, there’s Trevor and Julia. They best not be about to try to get me back in that car,” Jon grumbles.

“Think it’s a different car, Jon,” Gerry supplies, still amused.

The Hunters are leaning up against what is, indeed, a different car in the hotel’s idling zone. Jon put his foot down and chose an actual, classy hotel for their last night before the wedding. He’s been paranoid about the roadside venues for many reasons, and it’s only partially due to the amount of Corruption Statements he’s read. Jon’s been footing the trip with his Institute card, so the Hunters have no choice but to concede to his bone deep yearning for a decent bed.

Jon has expensive tastes, but it isn’t often he can justify the purchases so readily. It’s his wedding: he gets to choose how his last night a bachelor is spent. Or his last night not a widower, as it so happens.

His last night with his soon-to-be dearly departed spouse.

Jon needs a cigarette.

“H-hold on a moment,” Jon says, sitting down on a waiting bench as he fumbles for his lighter.

“Oh, fuck, okay,” says Gerry, turning on their heel instantly to settle at Jon’s side. Their cold aura feels wonderful on his heated skin. “Trevor! Julia! Look alive!” Gerry calls across to the Hunters. Jon jumps, startled by the sudden volume. Then jumps again as a motorcycle roars into the inlet road between him and the Hunters. There’s only one rider, and it is far too large. It revs what could be an engine, but it sounds like what should be a scream.

The Hunters scramble for the newest car and gun it for the Stranger. The Stranger swerves toward the circular drop off where Jon and Gerry are, but Julia rides its bumper so aggressively that it takes off back down the street. The Hunters follow, country music blaring from the stolen convertible’s speakers.

“...Think it’s about time we head in, then.” Gerry says calmly. Jon drops his cigarette in an ashtray beside a blinking recorder and follows.

A four star hotel is visually indistinguishable from a two star, in America. Jon thinks so, at least. He’s fairly certain the inoffensive abstract paintings are enough of the same to be identical to all the other hotel paintings he’s seen along the way. The at once too-small and too-big-picture nature of the wallpaper and carpeting designs is narcotic in its deconstruction of familiarity. The unholy union of the Spiral and the Vast and the Stranger. What color would that be? Jon might still be a bit tipsy.

But so are a number of the others they pass in the overly long hallways. Jon fumbles with the card at their door, catches a giggling, happy couple entering their own room, late at night, in his peripherals. Gerry’s presence is cold at his side, where they lounge on the patterned wall, waiting for the couple to move so they can phase through it unseen. The door unlocks under his hand with a cheerful beep and he looks away quickly.

His pain rose again to 6/10 over the course of the night, maybe from the prolonged sitting, maybe just from how utterly destroyed Jon’s sleep schedule is, maybe from the lack of his prescriptions, maybe just from all the cramped vehicle travel. He’d had to excuse himself from the table to futz with his TENS unit halfway through, and then removed it in the cab. It had only helped so much.

Jon collapses on the bed in relief. Gerry settles on the other side of it with a sigh, as though they, too, can feel the relief of a good lie down after a long day. Their hair clips through the pillows. So do their elbows, when they fold their arms under their head.

The irony of the situation sobers up what was left of his drink after the Stranger. Jon is— Jon has never in his life thought he would go to a hotel room alone with someone after a date. He does move fast, when he wants to; he knows this about himself. But overtly sexual milestones have never been on the table.

And they still aren’t. Gerry is a ghost; they couldn’t lay a lustful hand on Jon if they wanted to. This is— this is almost the ideal situation, isn’t it? Not only because Jon trusts Gerry, as a person, but because there is a sort of supernatural safety net underscoring the darkness of the suite. They can be alone together, here, in the late night of their first and last date before their marriage, and Jon will leave this room just as untouched as he entered it. He takes out his sleepwear.

Gerry’s dark eyes blink at him before they abruptly look away.

“You can look,” Jon says, a bit amused with himself for the dramatics of those thoughts. A little guilty, as well. Gerry is a ghost; this is unequivocally a bad thing and should not be as relieving as it is, to know with utter sureness that he can lie in the same bed as Gerry without even the smallest hint of pressure.

“Isn’t that your job, Jon?” Gerry asks, a slow smirk spreading over their face as they turn back to him.

“I do believe that it is, which makes me the expert on looking.”

And so Gerry looks. Jon’s face is bare, his hair is tucked away for the night, and he’s leaving the henna paste on until the morning. The bruises beneath his eyes are deep. He looks like a mess. He doesn’t entirely feel like one. Gerry’s gaze is only steady and comfortable.

“That actually help any?” they ask after a moment.

“ _Yes_ ,” Jon moans, snuggling further down under the multiple heating pads. He prefers hot water bottles at home, but a patchwork of drugstore electric units have done well by him so far.

“Hm. Too bad there isn’t a spiritual version I could plug in.”

“How— how are you doing? I’ve neglected to check in with you, haven’t I?” Jon asks, struck with guilt.

“Nah, you’ve asked. It just… doesn't change. It’s the same feeling, no matter where I go or what I do. And I keep thinking about it. How it hurts, and it’s always there like some kind of sick tether, but it’s… I dunno. There’s no getting used to constant pain, but I feel like I’m all built up around it? It’s more important than me, somehow. I just wanted it to be over, but. I dunno, just, you’re dealing with the same thing and— “

“Gerry, pain is not a competition.” Jon interrupts. “Our circumstances are wildly different. I’ve had twenty years to learn to deal with all this, and you’ve had… what? A few days worth of time out of your page? I’m used to living with my pain, you— you can only be as used to it as you are to death.”

“I’m dead,” Gerry says hollowly, staring up at the ceiling unblinking.

“...Finally having that revelation?” Jon asks cautiously.

“Just… give me a minute,” Gerry mumbles, sitting up fully and running both hands over their face.

“As much time as you’d like,” Jon tells them.

They need more than a minute. Jon overheats before any sort of miracle cure happens, so he rearranges himself. Scoops icechips out of the thermal bin to chew. Lays out his clothes for tomorrow and repacks everything neatly. Mostly it’s just to let the noise of another person fill the room. It can be soothing, when you want to be alone, but not lonely. Jon used to do the same for Georgie, when she had her nearly-catatonic depression days.

Knowing what he knows now, those must have been the times when her End experience got to her. Or the PTSD from it, at any rate. Considering what he never told her about his own brush with the supernatural, he isn’t upset not to have known, and knowing the cause doesn’t help, since she’d done well at eliminating her triggers around the house. But using what he had learned from that, and what he now recognizes he felt from that time, he hopes it offers Gerry some measure of comfort.

When Jon concentrates, he can sense the End on Gerry. Their presence burns dull in the bed beside him— a sort of forceful quiet, a sucking void. The pain of death distilled. A corpse dressed for the grave, resting just out of view. Gerry sitting so still, bowed around their hands, holds the same cadence to it that Georgie’s absolute stillness under the sheets did. Distinctly funerary. But Jon had only mourned for how Georgie was feeling, her suffering; now it’s the same for Gerry. Neither of them are dead of it, not quite, not yet. There’s still time to comfort Gerry for what death stole from them.

Death sits quietly in the hotel room, and Jon works around it. The familiarity of that should astound him. But death has been a constant presence in his life since before he could really recall such things. It sits on his skin like a blanket, a familiar mantle of loss, instead of a shroud. It anchors him firmly. He turns off the recorder running on the nightstand.

“What do you need from me? I can talk or I can listen,” he offers quietly.

Gerry puffs out a sigh. “Honestly? Don’t really got much to say. My life went by fast, and I wasn’t happy for almost any of it. I don’t have any reason to even want to stay behind. I’m just… I’m just done, you know? It’s time for me to go, and honestly I’m quite agreeable about it. Already gave my statement, so there really isn’t anything left of me.”

“That’s not true,” Jon says instantly, frowning fiercely at Gerry’s blank expression. “There is so much more to you than your statement, Gerry.”

“Is there?” they ask, voice ringing hollow. “Wasn’t my life just one statement after another?”

Jon stares back at them helplessly. The clock on the nightstand glows red through the veil of Gerry’s form. Midnight.

It’s officially their wedding day.


End file.
